LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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I UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



The Social Influence 

of Christianity 

With Special Reference to Contemporary Problems. 



BY 

DAVID J. HILL, LL.D., 

President of Bucknell University. 



THE NEWTON LECTURES FOR 1887. 



Let him that stole steal no more : but rather let him labor, working 
with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to 
him that needeth. — Saint Paul. 



BOSTON : 

SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY, 

50 Bromfield Street. 

1888. 







Copyright, 1888, 
By Silver, Burdett & Co. 



Electrotyped and Printed by 
Stanley &* Usher, iji Devonshire St., Boston. 



TO 

fl$p ft$otf>er, 

CATHARINE J. PACKER, 

THIS VOLUME IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED. 



PREFACE. 



This volume consists of eight lectures delivered before the 
Newton Theological Institution, in May, 1887, at the invita- 
tion of the president and faculty, and through the liberality of 
the Hon. J. W. Merrill. The lectures are now published at 
the request of the president, faculty, and students, and consti- 
tute the second published volume of "Newton Lectures," the 
first being "The Hebrew Feasts," by Professor William Henry 
Green, d.d., ll.d., of Princeton Theological Seminary. 

The lecturer was permitted to supplement his general prep- 
aration as a teacher of political economy and sociology during 
the past ten years, by six months of travel and observation in 
the principal countries of central and southern Europe with 
these lectures constantly in view, and by six months of spe- 
cial reading in the literature collected before and during his 
journey. 

He desires to make public acknowledgment of the sustained 
interest shown by all who attended the course of lectures, and 
especially of the personal courtesy and hospitality of President 
Hovey and the members of the faculty during his pleasant 
visit at Newton. 



CONTENTS. 



I. What is Human Society? 

II. What has Christianity done for Society? 

III. Christianity and the Problems of Labor . . 

IV. Christianity and the Problems of Wealth . 
V. Christianity and the Problems of Marriage 

VI. Christianity and the Problems of Education 

VII. Christianity and the Problems of Legislation 

VIII. Christianity and the Problems of Repression 



PAGE 

9 

35 
65 
95 
127 

*57 
187 
211 



[For detailed analysis see page preceding the beginning of each 
lecture.] 



I. 

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 



i. Preliminary Questions. 

2. The twofold View of the Sophists. 

I. THE NATURALISTIC CONCEPTION OF SOCIETY. 

i. Plato's Theory. 

2. Aristotle's Theory. 

3. Naturalistic Doctrines in Modern Times. 

(1) Montesquieu; (2) Condorcet ; (3) Kant; (4) 
Quetelet; (5) Buckle. 

4. Biological Sociology. 

(1) Spencer; (2) Schaeffle ; (3) Espinas ; (4) Mul- 
ford. 

5. Inadequacy of the Naturalistic Conception. 

II. THE IDEALISTIC CONCEPTION OF SOCIETY. 

1. Rousseau's Social Contract. 
2. 



The Theocratic Conception. 

The Kingdom of God. 

Christian Society. 

The Ideal in the Formation of Society. 



III. THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NATURAL AND THE 
IDEAL IN SOCIETY. 

1. Society founded in Human Wants. 

2. Society modified by Human Wills. 

3. Society perfected through Ideals. 

4. Answer to the question, What is human society? 



THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF 
CHRISTIANITY. 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 

I. An accurate conception of the nature of society 
is an essential prerequisite to any valuable discussion 
of its problems. This conception may be obtained 
by resolving society into its elementary constituents 
and discovering the forces and laws by which these 
elements are united. Human society is composed of 
individual human beings, who may be considered as 
its atomic units. The process of analysis is very 
simple, but the forces of social synthesis and the 
laws of their action present materials of great com- 
plexity. Does the cause of association lie in the 
human individual, or does it pertain to the environ- 
ment in which individuals are placed ? Does it 
originate from conscious volition, or does it proceed 
from organic constitution ? Does it admit of volun- 
tary counteraction and resistance, or does it produce 
its results by necessity ? These are questions which 
must be answered before we can solve any social 
problem whatever ; for, if the will of man is not in 



IO SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

any sense the cause of society, it is difficult to 
imagine how it can transform, or even slightly 
modify, the social structure. 

These preliminary questions reduce themselves to 
one, which may be formulated thus : What is the 
relation of individuals to the social whole ; is it that 
of living parts united by natural laws into a greater 
organism, or is it that of voluntary members freely 
choosing their form of association ? More briefly 
still, Is society a natural organism, or is it a voluntary 
group formed by contract ? 

2. We may trace from a great antiquity two dis- 
tinct and opposing conceptions created in answer to 
this question. The Greek Sophists, who raised 
nearly all the questions which men have since been 
trying to answer, divided the world into two parts : 
one ruled by the inflexible laws of nature, the other 
governed by the freewill of man. 1 They considered 
a part of our human laws as arbitrary or conven- 
tional ; others, as derived from the constitution of 
man, and hence the projection of inanimate nature, 
independent of volition and wholly unalterable. 
Upon this fundamental distinction have been erected 
two different theories of society, which we may des- 
ignate as the Naturalistic Theory and the Idealistic 
Theory. 

I. 

i. Although Plato is best known as an idealist, his 
social theory belongs to the naturalistic type. For 

1 For this doctrine of the Sophists, see Plato's Laws, 889. The best 
translation is Jowett's. 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 1 1 

him society is a product of nature, a creature of 
instinct and environment. Organic need is the de- 
termining cause of social, as it is of animal, organi- 
zation. 2 The division of labor in the sphere of 
industrial production was fully understood by Plato, 
and its origin was referred to the diversity of natural 
powers and aptitudes. A state, he taught, is a liv- 
ing body, similar to an individual organism. Its 
different classes are like the various faculties of an 
individual being, and it is endowed with a soul — an 
emanation of the universal reason. Its growth and 
decay, its diseases and its conflicts of function, are 
similar to those of a living man. But as nature is 
the creation of God, so also is society. As there is 
an ideal for the individual man, whose highest attain- 
ment is perfect virtue, so there is an ideal for the 
State, the perfect republic. This ideal Plato at- 
tempted to picture. It is a community in which the 
wise govern, in which virtue, as he conceived it, is 
universally cultivated by the union of the best and 
the elimination of the base, and yet involving the 
destruction of the family and its affections, the per- 
petuation of the militant spirit, and the laudation of 
a narrow nationalism. This most visionary of ideal- 
ists is still the most radical of realists. The members 
of the social body are wholly devoid of spontaneity. 
The realization of the ideal must come from God 
alone, whose agent is the wise man clothed with 
power. Little did Plato dream that this "wise man " 

2 For Plato's ideas on the nature of society, see his Republic, translated 
by Jowett. 



12 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

was hoped for and expected by the Hebrew people, 
the Deliverer and Messiah, who should bring to 
earth, not the narrow national supremacy desired by 
both Plato and the Hebrews, but the perfect king- 
dom for which the world was waiting. 

2. Aristotle approaches the question of the nature 
of society with all of Plato's realism, but without his 
ideal tendencies. For Aristotle the State is the 
product of nature, and he proceeds to study it from 
a natural point of view. 3 He points out an impor- 
tant fact, that the individual cannot exist in isola- 
tion. He finds the social unit not in the individual, 
but in the pair, the family. But this unit is not an 
atom ; it is composite ; it is already an organism, a 
living molecule whose parts could not subsist alone. 
This is a fertile conception. It draws society within 
the boundaries of biology. Society is no longer a 
dead thing, but a living being. Since it is a living 
organism, it is subjected to the laws of birth and 
death, of growth and dissolution, which rule all life. 
Change is its essential condition. Every attempt, 
then, to impose upon it an immutable constitution 
must prove chimerical. Societies differ according to 
their times and according to their environments. 
No constitution can be adapted to all peoples. 
Again, no living being is composed of wholly simi- 
lar parts. Society ought to be composed of parts 
which are separated from one another by differences. 
This is why the family, Aristotle's social element, is 

3 For Aristotle's philosophy of society, see his Politics, translated by 
Jowett. 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? I 3 

formed of heterogeneous constituents : man, woman, 
and children. That difference is the condition of 
their union. Here is not only diversity, but subordi- 
nation, gradation of power, a scale of authority ; the 
woman obeying the man, and the child the woman. 
In this rudimentary society is the beginning of gov- 
ernment. The father becomes the patriarch, the 
patriarch the king. Thus is developed the social 
organism. Nature ordains these differences, from 
them grows the equilibrium of the whole people; 
and so society exists, not by convention and choice, 
but by inherent constitution and necessity. Each 
individual finds himself at birth a part of a social 
whole which neither he nor any other man has cre- 
ated. Without this preexisting environment he 
would not be what he is. He is, then, himself the 
creature of society rather than its creator. Its lan- 
guage, its traditions, its customs, its laws, combine 
to shape him and to determine his individuality. 
How fully this idea was accepted by the Greeks is 
evident from the value they put upon culture as 
essential to the making of a man, and also from their 
word ldi6rrj<s, which first meant a " private man," 
then a "clumsy fellow," and at last a "fool," an 
"idiot." 

We may summarize the whole doctrine of pagan 
antiquity as being in its final conclusions a naturalis- 
tic and organic theory of society. Without arriving at 
the definite biological conception that prevails in mod- 
ern sociology, Greek thought distinctly grasped the 
idea that society is created by forces outside of man 



H 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



himself, yet operating through him as their necessary- 
organ, thus producing not merely an aggregate but a 
living organism. 

3. To follow in detail the history of social theories 
would certainly prove wearisome, and probably would 
efface the memory of the most important outlines by 
filling the mind with insignificant refinements. And 
yet we cannot do justice to the naturalistic school 
without a passing notice of the progress it has made. 

(1) In Montesquieu's epoch-making " Spirit of the 
Laws" we find the naturalistic conception prevailing. 4 
He regards the organization of society as reposing 
less on human ideas than on instinctive impulsions 
— such as the sense of dependence on others, the 
need of aliments, the sexual attachment, and the 
sympathetic inclinations. Though the State is for 
the great French jurist the work of mind, its roots 
reach down into physical conditions out of which it 
is developed. The laws express this origin and are 
but the reflex of the natural environment. 

(2) Condorcet emphasized this tendency of thought 
by proposing that the methods of the physical sci- 
ences be applied also to moral and social phenomena. 5 
He taught that human progress is subject to physical 
laws and capable of even mathematical treatment. 
To measure social phenomena in order to discover 
their laws ; to draw from the knowledge of their laws 
the foreknowledge of future phenomena ; to found 



4 Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, livre i, chapitre ii. 

B Condorcet, Esquisse d'un Tableau historique des progres de l'Esprit 
Humain. 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? I 5 

upon that foreknowledge combinations and preven- 
tions which would secure the amelioration of the 
human race, — such was Condorcet's doctrine of the 
task and the power of social science. 

(3) Although Immanuel Kant made absolute free- 
dom the masterpiece of his metaphysics, he regarded 
the world of phenomena as ruled by invariable laws. 
In the marvelous harmonies of nature he discerned a 
secret conspiracy of forces which is, indeed, mechani- 
cal, but at the same time the expression of a superior 
will. Human actions were for him determined in 
great part by general laws of nature. He thought 
that, as " the laws of the variation of the atmosphere 
are constant, though no particular can be foreseen at 
a given point, and in the mass they occasion in a 
uniform manner and without interruption the growth 
of plants, the course of streams, and all the other 
occurrences of the natural economy," so the social 
phenomena — births and deaths, marriages and 
divorces — are subject to natural laws. 6 We may 
trace similar ideas in the writings of Fichte and 
Hegel, who gave them abundant illustration mingled 
with the vagaries of a fanciful subjectivism, and espe- 
cially in those of Herder, who first applied the prin- 
ciple of natural evolution to history and claimed for 
it the character of an exact science. 

(4) Very important additions were made to social 
science by the Belgian mathematician, Quetelet, who 
by measurements and statistics sought to demon- 
strate the uniformity of social phenomena. His 

6 Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte. 



1 6 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

methods are too technical for popular exposition, but 
he may be accorded the distinction of having raised 
statistics to the dignity of a science. His " Social 
Physics " is a memorable contribution to the science 
of man and of society. His tables show that acts of 
the most personal and apparently spontaneous nature 
are measurable by general rules. For example, the 
number of murders committed in France in six suc- 
cessive years, from 1826 to 1831 inclusive, shows a 
very slight variation ; and the proportion of the 
instruments of destruction employed is about the 
same from year to year. Thus, for five successive 
years the number of murders committed with a gun 
or pistol does not vary more than eight, the absolute 
numbers being 56, 64, 60, 61, and 57. Such observa- 
tions led Quctelet to maintain that "society encloses 
in itself the germ of the crimes that are committed. 
It is society itself, in a certain sense, that prepares 
them, and the criminal is only the instrument who 
executes them. The social state, then, supposes a 
certain order of crimes, which result as a necessary 
consequence from its organization." 7 I do not pause 
to criticize either the logic or the ethics of this rea- 
soning, but note it as a stage in the development of 
sociology. 

(5) Buckle has attempted the construction of a 
history of civilization on the assumption " that the 
moral actions of men are the product, not of their 
volition, but of their antecedents." Social progress, 

7 Quetelet, Physique Sociale ; ou, Essai sur le Developpement des Facultes 
de l'Homme, 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 17 

he says, is "the result of large and general causes 
which, working upon the aggregate of society, pro- 
duce certain consequences without regard to the 
volition of those particular men of whom the society 
is composed." 8 These "large and general causes" 
are "climate, food, soil, and the general aspect of 
nature." Here volition is absolutely excluded as a 
factor of progress. Quetelet explains social phe- 
nomena as produced through human volition, but 
Buckle takes the higher ground that human volition 
is wholly excluded from effecting social changes. 
He was clearly a more loyal determinist than he 
was a faithful observer. 

4. It has been reserved for our age to erect a com- 
plete sociology upon a purely naturalistic basis, treat- 
ing society as a natural growth, a veritable organism 
in the strictest sense of the word, as little dependent 
upon human volition as any example in the animal 
series. 

(1) For Herbert Spencer, sociology is simply an 
extension of biology. 9 He has come upon societies 
long before arriving at man in the order of evolution. 
Every individual animal, he affirms, is a society, com- 
posed of living constituents. The individuality of 
an animal, far from excluding that of its component 
elements, supposes and requires it. Organic compo- 
sition is simply a union of living parts into more 
extended living wholes. Man is an individual only in 

8 Buckle's History of Civilization in England. 

9 Spencer's Illustrations of Universal Progress, essay on The Social 
Organism ; and Principles of Sociology. 



1 8 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

a relative sense. He is really a society of smaller 
individuals. His unity is the result of their organi- 
zation. He is thus either identical with them or a 
result of their combination. When dissolution takes 
place he is no more. These constituents have been 
differentiated and specialized so that each class has 
its own function. Human society is to individual 
men what a single man is to the living cells of his 
body. It is more than an aggregate, it is a veritable 
organism. It is not formed by voluntary association 
any more than an animal body is, but by the uncon- 
scious grouping of individual men acting according 
to the laws of their nature. Human society is, 
therefore, simply an "episode of universal evolution," 
as necessary as a crystal and as little the work of will. 
(2) Spencer's principal difficulty in completing 
the analogy between society and an animal organ- 
ism is thus expressed by himself : " The parts of an 
animal form a concrete whole ; but the parts of a 
society form a whole that is discrete. While the 
living units composing the whole are bound together 
in close contact in the animal, the living units com- 
posing society are free, not in contact, and more or 
less widely dispersed." Spencer's attempts to explain 
away this disparity are not so successful as those of 
the German sociologist, Schaeffle, in his " Structure 
and Life of the Social Body." In that exhaustive 
work, the learned author shows that in every animal 
organism there is an intercellular substance, which 
is not composed of the living cells, but acts as a 
means of separation and communication between them. 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 1 9 

The discontinuity of the parts of the social body is 
not, therefore, a fatal objection to its being con- 
sidered as an organism, since this is quite in analogy 
with the structure of animal bodies. The roads, 
railways, and telegraphic lines of human society serve 
to bring its constituents into practical coherence, as 
the nerves of sensation do in the animal body. That 
these were a late development is quite in analogy 
with biological history, in which the formation of a 
nervous system marks an advanced stage of animal 
evolution. 

(3) The finishing touch to the naturalistic theory 
seems to have been given by the French zoologist, 
Espinas, who, in his " Animal Societies," discovers the 
necessity and the fact of association in the lowest 
orders of the animal creation, and supplies many data 
in tracing the evolution of human society from 
the rudimentary social life of the inferior animals. 
" No living being," says Espinas, " is alone. The 
animals in particular sustain numerous relations with 
the existences which surround them ; and, without 
speaking of those which live in permanent commerce 
with their kind, almost all are constrained by bio- 
logical necessities to contract, though it be for a brief 
period, an intimate union with some other individual 
of their species." 10 

(4) Thus the lowest forms of life and human 
society are connected as products of natural forces 
operating under a law of evolution. Society is, then, 
the greatest of animals. But we are led a step 

10 Espinas, Des Societes Animates. 



20 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

beyond this. In his book on " The Nation," the 
late Dr. Mulford says : " The physical organism is 
determined in itself by a law of necessity, as the 
tree which cannot be other than it is ; the ethical 
organism is determined in a law of freedom, which 
is the condition of moral action. . . . The conditions 
of history presume the being of the nation as a 
moral organism. History is not a succession of 
separate events and actions, but a development in a 
moral order, and in the unity and continuity of a 
life which moves on unceasingly, as some river in its 
unbroken current. It is only as the nation is an 
organism that this unity and continuity is manifest 
in it, and as a moral organism that this moral order 
is confirmed in it." n Dr. Mulford then adds : "The 
nation is a moral personality." So it seems that a 
society is not simply a great animal, but a great 
person. All this may be very true, but I cannot 
resist the feeling that in some way we have passed 
out of the sphere of science into a cloudland of 
mythology, when the nation is endowed with person- 
ality. If we have shrunk from Auguste Comte's 
apotheosis of Humanity as the Supreme Being, how 
shall we treat this " moral person " to whom Dr. 
Mulford' s speculative mind has introduced us ? How 
august and majestic this "moral person " must be, to 
whom we all stand in the relation of microscopic cells 
to a human body ! Has biology, then, a new religion ? 
But the moment I try to regain my own sense of 
personality, which seems swallowed up in this " moral 

11 E. Mulford's The Nation, chap, i, 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 2 1 

person," I find myself in trouble. I do not see how 
a person can be composed of other persons. He 
would be a congress, not a person. If a person can- 
not be composed of other persons, then this " moral 
person," which society is said to be, is either not a 
person at all, or else is a person apart from its con- 
stituents, individual men. In the latter case we have 
a new divinity who is a separate personal being, the 
soul of the nation. This brings us back to Plato. 
But if a person cannot be composed solely of other 
organisms, then I, as a person, am something apart 
from the constituent cells that form my body. I 
am a society plus personality. Now, admitting that 
society is an organism, that is, made up of other 
organisms, there is something in society that is not 
organism, the individual personalities that inhabit the 
constituent organisms themselves. Here we come 
upon a great truth. It is that the organic theory of 
society leaves out of account this element of person- 
ality that belongs to every human individual. As 
for Dr. Mulford's " moral person," that is but the 
creature of the power of abstraction. It is the 
personification, merely, of the social bond — the 
mythologizing tendency that peopled the Pantheon 
with creatures of the fancy, alive in the nineteenth 
century and creating a national divinity. This " moral 
person" can nowhere be found, except in the individual 
men of the nation. But each of these men con- 
sciously knows in himself a personality that is neither 
the sum nor the product of his component parts. He 
is an organism plus a person. More precisely, he is 
a person in an organism. 



2 2 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

(5) Admitting the truth of the naturalistic theory 
of society, as far as it goes, except the completeness 
of it, we seem to have missed some important factor. 
That factor is personality. However we may doubt 
the personality of Dr. Mulford's " moral person," 
we cannot doubt that we ourselves are persons. 
The question, then, is : What have persons contri- 
buted to the constitution of society, beyond what 
natural forces have contributed ? The naturalistic 
sociology is merely one of observation and induction. 
It can observe and report social facts. It cannot do 
more. It cannot explain progress, which is the one 
preeminently important social phenomenon. It can- 
not determine, by its purely physical methods, what 
ougJit to be, or that anything " ought to be. " It is 
utterly powerless to solve any social problem, because 
its fundamental postulate is that the will and intellect 
of man have no initiative power, either to create or 
transform society. As for social responsibility, there 
can be none for the naturalistic theory. All is 
determined by natural necessity, and, upon this 
assumption, " Whatever is, is right." 

II. 

1. The missing factor in the naturalistic concep- 
tion of society is human personality. Man is a force 
other than physical nature, conscious of himself and 
of his power, reacting upon and transforming his envi- 
ronment, partly its master and not wholly its crea- 
ture. This is the assumption of Rousseau, who, 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 



23 



though not without predecessors in proclaiming this 
truth, is its most celebrated modern advocate among 
social theorists. Modern republicanism is a political 
movement, based on the dignity and essential free- 
dom of human nature, on the fact and the potency 
of personality. It is incompatible with pure and 
absolute naturalism, which teaches the doctrine that 
" might makes right " under the milder formula of 
the " struggle for existence and the survival of the 
fittest." Rousseau is the philosopher of republican- 
ism. He assumes certain inherent and inalienable 
rights in man ; that is, his possession of personality, 
without which he could not have rights, and his ethi- 
cal nature, without which he could not know them. 
Rousseau conceives society as having been instituted 
by a " social contract," a compact voluntarily formed 
by free agents, in order to secure the protection of 
their rights by union and reciprocity. Their primary 
equality, their personal freedom, and their pursuit of 
an ideal are all involved in this theory. 12 But Rous- 
seau embarrassed the truth with cumbrous impedi- 
menta of error. The "state of nature " is for him an 
atomistic condition of existence, in which men are 
imagined as wandering in isolation, without interrela- 
tions, without institutions, and without laws. It has 
been easy for the naturalistic school to show that 
such a condition of human life is impossible, and 
such historical critics as Sir Henry Maine and such 
political theorists as Bluntschli have rejected it as 
not only unhistoric but utterly fanciful. To refute 

12 Rousseau, Contrat Social, livre i, chapitre iv. 



24 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Rousseau's doctrine of the origin of society, how- 
ever, is by no means to show that voluntary contract 
has not been a transforming element in social pro- 
gress. Society is not the creation of a day, but the 
growth of centuries. History shows that men have 
acted in the formation of new societies and in the 
reconstruction of old ones under the guidance of an 
ideal whose abstract formula is voluntary contract. 
I believe that Rousseau is correct in maintaining 
that men have made society what it is by following a 
pattern that was an idea before it was a reality. 

2. If we care to retrace the idealistic conception of 
society to its source, we shall find its origin among 
the ancient Hebrews. The theocracy instituted by 
Moses, a kingdom without a human king, a common- 
wealth built on worship, was held together by the alle- 
giance of the people ; and, while its constitution was 
divinely ordained, membership in it was a voluntary 
adherence. Moses erected a moral ideal, established 
a ceremonial to give it vitality, and appealed to men 
to realize it by submitting to theocratic laws. Apos- 
tasy was always possible, and sometimes chosen. 
The Hebrew commonwealth, in its beginning, was 
essentially a form of association based on voluntary 
recognition of a moral ideal. It never lost this char- 
acter. The Judges served to give personality and 
form to the moral and religious union of the people, 
but they could not unify and concentrate the Hebrew 
nation. After the loss of nationality, the political 
feebleness of the commonwealth in the midst of 
powerful monarchies was keenly felt. Samuel be- 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 



25 



came virtual king of Israel, a king who ruled the 
conscience and swayed the whole moral nature of his 
people. " He seems to have entertained the magnifi- 
cent but impracticable conception," says Dr. J. H. 
Allen, " that the real and acknowledged sovereign of 
Israel should be the invisible Divinity and Protector, 
whose arm had guarded the nation in so many perils, 
whose Spirit had from the first commissioned and 
inspired its faithful men ; and that the actual ruler 
should be only, as it were, a regent, or viceroy, of 
this unseen sovereign." 13 Accordingly, he erected 
into the permanence and power of an institution the 
prophetic function, by the establishment of the 
" Schools of the Prophets." Out of this institution 
of prophecy came those predictions and expectations 
of the Prince of Peace, the spiritual sovereign, who 
should be at once king and deliverer, the realized 
hope of Israel. No doubt it was with heavy heart, 
made heavier by the disappointments that followed, 
that Samuel saw the necessity of choosing a human 
king. The king was appointed and Samuel's fears 
were realized. Thus the theocracy that had been a 
fact with Moses and a reminiscence with Samuel, 
became for the prophets a splendid dream of the 
future. The throne never ceased to feel the power 
of the school. Exposure and denunciation of wrong, 
exposition and proclamation of justice, even interfer- 
ence with the royal counsels and the authoritative 
dictation of policy, became the functions of the 
prophets, who continually voiced forth and empha- 

13 J. H. Allen's Hebrew Men and Times, chap. iii. 



26 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

sized the ideals of the theocracy. " Both in their 
own and in the popular belief, they were in the 
strictest sense ambassadors and representatives, to 
speak before the nation messages from the invisible 
and dread majesty of its King." 

3. Out of that "goodly fellowship of the prophets" 
came the Messianic predictions which rendered possi- 
ble the mission of Christ's forerunner. " The king- 
dom of heaven is at hand ! " cried John in the wil- 
derness. He came not from books and circles of 
scholars, as if his message were a discovery of learn- 
ing ; not from courts and councils, as if it were an 
induction gathered from political policies, but from 
the solitudes of the desert, as if to announce a proc- 
lamation from God himself. Christ appeared, to 
fulfill his words and interpret their meaning. " My 
kingdom is not of this world," he said, yet " the 
kingdom of God is within you." It is a kingdom for 
this world, though not of it. He taught his disciples 
to pray : " Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in 
earth as it is in heaven." That prayer and its an- 
swer have gradually transformed and are transform- 
ing human society. The old order which PJato and 
Aristotle saw about them was not a wholly necessary 
or permanent order. Through the teachings of 
Christ the theocratic idea of society which Moses 
taught the ancient Hebrews, which Samuel loved 
but could not perpetuate in its purity, which the 
prophets steadily held before the world for centu- 
ries, and which the Christian ministry has diffused 
throughout the globe, has become the confessed 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 2 J 

faith of all civilized nations, who accept it because 
they are civilized, and are civilized because they ac- 
cept it. For these millions, higher and more potent 
than any human king is the " King Invisible." His 
will is the ideal of society, and must be discovered 
and obeyed. Henceforth men conceive that society 
is to be shaped by the conformity of individual wills 
to a divine will. It is the organized assent of per- 
sons to the plan of a Person. It is no longer the 
product of nature alone, the creature of cosmic 
forces acting in accordance with necessary laws. 
Its climax is not in the realization of a " moral per- 
son " whose substance is the nation, but in conform- 
ity to an infinite righteousness whose substance is 
the living God. 

4. Christ not only introduced what was to the 
pagan world a new idea of society, but he proposed 
to create a new society. What was his method ? 
" It was," says Dr. Fairbairn, " to work from within 
outward, from the one to the many, from the unit to 
the mass. He proceeded by calling individuals, for 
their own sakes indeed, yet not for their own sakes 
only, but for man's as well. Christ, in order that 
the truth and life in him might live and work, cre- 
ated out of the men he called and saved a society, 
the kingdom of heaven, the city of God. . . . The 
society of the saved was intended to be a society of 
the healed, working like a great healthful balm in 
the sick heart of humanity." 14 Was it not his aim 

14 A. M. Fairbairn's The City of God, part iii ; Discourse on Christ in 
History. 



28 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

that this society should ultimately absorb and trans- 
figure human society ? Has Christianity, then, no 
relation to social problems ? Is not its relation that 
of leaven to the loaf, a perfect solution of social 
problems by a thorough permeation and transforma- 
tion ? If not, why should we continue to pray 
against hope, " Thy kingdom come " ? 

5. We have found among the Hebrews a concep- 
tion of society based upon a realizable ideal. While 
it is in part in perfect contrast to the prevailing pagan 
conception, it does not altogether exclude the notion 
of society as a natural product and essentially an 
organism. It would seem, on the contrary, that the 
Hebrew doctrine of God's relation to the world as 
Creator and Providence would involve likewise his 
authorship of society. In truth, the Hebrew com- 
monwealth was regarded as his particular creation, 
and it was held to differ from other societies in being 
throughout of divine constitution. But the volun- 
tary element was always uppermost in the Hebrew 
mind. God " chose " his people, and his people also 
" chose " him. " Choose you this day, whom ye will 
serve," implies the presence of volition in the union 
with the commonwealth. The human will was even 
more distinctly recognized by Christ. " Ye will not 
come to me, that ye might have life," marks the 
entrance into the kingdom of heaven, not, indeed, as 
resulting from volition, but as impossible without it. 
If we accept the psychology of Christ, we shall hold 
that certain forms of association are based upon con- 
sent, or covenant, and that society is composed of 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 29 

persons who do not act solely from necessity. Soci- 
ety may also be an organism. Paul does not hesi- 
tate to describe a spiritual society in the terms of 
organic analogy. "For as we have many members 
in one body, and all members have not the same 
office ; so we, being many, are one body in Christ ; 
and every one members one of another." And the 
Church is called "the body" of Christ. But we 
must not forget that this body is composed of those 
who have willingly become its parts, and that uncon- 
scious or involuntary constituents are wholly beyond 
the scope of its inclusion. Those who "would not 
come " that they " might have life " were excluded 
from that body, the Church, in which the life of 
Christ is supposed especially to reside. The very 
notion of the kingdom of God implies a conscious 
and voluntary entrance into it. " Repent ye, repent 
ye," is the herald's cry, as he invites men to enter 
the coming kingdom, as if the very foundation of 
that new society depended upon the mental acts of 
its possible constituents. And thus has been vindi- 
cated in the field of history by the growth of that 
ever-coming kingdom, and even more fully by its 
variant forms of polity illustrated in the develop- 
ment of the Church, the power of men to pursue, 
and in part to realize, a social ideal, to associate 
themselves by contract and covenant for purposes 
dear to themselves, and to constitute a society of 
which nature is not the cause, and which is a living 
organism only as it embodies a life that is not a pro- 
duct of itself. 



3Q 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



III. 



We are now prepared to make a rapid synthesis of 
the elements that constitute society and to answer 
our main question : What is its nature ? 

i. Man is a being of numerous instinctive wants, 
whose satisfaction requires his association with 
others of his kind. Endowed with reason and 
articulate speech, men naturally seelc companion- 
ship. Sympathy also serves to draw men together, 
and affection weaves its invisible but powerful net- 
work about them. Three preeminent needs are con- 
stant and universal with men, holding together even 
the incommunicative, the unsympathetic, and those 
without true affection. They are : (i) The need of 
physical comforts, which gives rise to economic insti- 
tutions ; (2) the need of sexual companionship, 
which gives rise to the domestic institution ; and 
(3) the need of protection from enemies and the 
rapacious, which gives rise to political institutions. 
These are the " social bonds " which, more than any 
others, hold individuals together in society. Thus 
the rudiments of society are formed by nature. 

2. Men are also endowed with will, and in satisfy- 
ing these needs, they may regard or ignore the laws 
of normal conduct. They may satisfy their physical 
appetites by labor, theft, or slavery. They may 
establish their sexual relations upon the basis of 
monogamy or upon that of polygamy. They may 
protect themselves by private wars, by servile sub- 
mission to a chief who will promise them safety, or 



WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 3 I 

by the enactment of just laws to be executed by 
public officers. It is because the will of man may 
modify the rudimentary society established by na- 
ture, that there are social problems. 

3. But man is not simply a compound of instinc- 
tive wants and self-determining will. He is also 
endowed with intellect, by which he can create and 
comprehend ideals both of private and public action. 
The real progress of society is attained in the grad- 
ual realization of these ideals by their incorporation 
into life. The problems of society in every age are, 
how to render the ideal actual in the performance of 
social functions. 

4. Our answer to the question, What is human 
society ? is this : It is a composite product of (1) 
natural wants, (2) human wills, and (3) moral ideals. 
The human society of to-day is the result of associa- 
tion prompted by human wants, which are formulated 
by human wills, through the partial appropriation of 
moral ideals. The reconstruction or transformation 
of society must proceed upon a clear comprehension 
of the natural basis of society in the instinctive 
wants of man, the mode in which the human will 
can affect the performance of social functions, and 
the motives for the conformity of the popular will to 
the ideals of a higher social life. 

I can never think of the relation of Christianity 
to social problems without seeing before my mind's 
eye that powerful picture of Hofmann's that hangs 
in the gallery at Dresden, representing the youthful 
Christ in the Temple, surrounded by the Jewish 



32 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

doctors. In the midst of that throng of shrewd yet 
puzzled faces, wearing the venerable aspect of 
authority, the gentle youth stands a little apart, 
his sad, intellectual features softened with a smile 
of unutterable sweetness, his high, pure brow and 
•vhite, glistening garments radiating a light that 
. c eems to palpitate with life and to chase away every 
shadow within the sweep of its illumination. He 
stands there like a heavenly messenger who has just 
arrived from the effulgence of the throne of God 
upon some earthly embassy. The doctors of the 
law are silent before him. They wait, as if in awe, 
for the parting of his boyish lips. It is the picture 
of the living Christ opening to mortal eyes the 
vision of God's coming kingdom. Thus to earth's 
sovereigns and jurisconsults and doctrinaires and 
social theorists Christ unfolds the divine ideals of 
human society, while the waiting world is hushed 
into silence by the spell of his power and hangs 
its hopes upon his words of life. 



II. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE 
FOR SOCIETY? 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE FOR SOCIETY? 



I. WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY ? 

i. As an Ethical Doctrine and Life. 

2. As an Influence touching the whole Nature. 

3. The Method of Christianity. 

II. THE SOCIAL FUNCTIONS AFFECTED BY CHRIS- 
TIANITY. 

1. Possibility of tracing the Social Influence of Chris- 

tianity. 

2. The Functions of Society : 

(1) The Industrial; 

(2) The Domestic ; 

(3) The Political. 

III. THE EFFECTS OF CHRISTIANITY UPON 
SOCIETY. 

1 . Upon Labor and the Laborer : 

(1) By dignifying Labor; 

(2) By producing a Rehabilitation of Labor ; 

(3) By destroying Slavery ; 

(4) By consecrating Labor. 

2. Upon Wealth and its Uses : 

(1) Chrisfs Doctrine of Wealth. 

(2) Christian Beneficence. 

(3) Christianity and the Right of Property. 

3. Upon Marriage and Woman. 

(1) The Ancient Status of Woman. 

(2) The Germanic Status. 

(3) The Transformation of Marriage. 

4. Upon Children and Education. 

(1) The Ancient Status of Children. 

(2) The Character of Pagan Education. 

(3) The Establishment of Christian Schools. 

5. Upon Legislation. 

(1) In respect to Personal Status. 

(2) In respect to Personal Conduct. 

6. Upon Punishment. 



II. 

WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE FOR SOCIETY? 

Having arrived at a conception of the nature of 
human society, we may ask, What has Christianity 
done for it ? From this historical retrospect we may 
derive some aid in showing what more it can do in 
the future for society. As a preliminary, however, 
to both these inquiries, we must first ask, What do 
we mean by Christianity ? 

I. 

i. Nothing is more difficul t than to imprison within 
a brief verbal formula the essence of Christianity. It 
is hardly necessary for me to say that I nowhere in- 
tend to identify it with the Church. That would be 
to include a large element of human policy and even 
directly anti-Christian power. I can find no better 
expression of my idea of Christianity than to say 
that it is the influence of Jesus Christ. It is a 
double influence, that of a personal life and that of 
doctrinal teaching ; of a life not less than of a doc- 
trine, for the figure of Christ's person is not less 
conspicuous in the world's eye than the authority of 
his teaching. Indeed, it must be admitted that the 
authority of his doctrine proceeds from the nature 
of his person. Between them there is the most per- 



2,6 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

feet union. His great forerunner said : " In him 
was life, and the life was the light of men." That 
luminous life was a double one, in which the divine 
and the human were consciously united. His doc- 
trine is the revelation of his life, translated into 
human language. It teaches the Fatherhood of God 
and the brotherhood of men, as realized in his own 
being. His conception of a perfect society is a state 
in which God is loved as Father, and men are loved 
as brethren. Hence, he sums up all human duty in 
that brief epitome of the law : " Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind ; 
and thy neighbour as thyself." We must not allow 
ourselves to fall into the barren scholasticism of re- 
garding this summary as merely a new classification 
of duties. Its true originality is not in its abridge- 
ment of earlier ethical codes, but in the disclosure of 
the real essence of the human ideal. The emphasis 
of Christ's new promulgation of the law is not love 
God, or love thy neighbor, but love God, and love thy 
neighbor. Love is the essence of the law. It is not 
a classification of duties which Christ offers, but a 
new statement of the very substance of duty. 

2. Christianity is the influence of that doctrine, 
and of the life in which it was perfectly exemplified, 
on the world. It has proved the most epoch-making 
influence that has ever been introduced into society. 
It has appealed to the intellect and to the heart with 
a power to which no other influence is comparable, at 
once enlightening the understanding and quickening 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 37 

the sensibilities. There were other elements, how- 
ever, in the influence of Christ as potent in com- 
manding men as his ethical doctrine and his personal 
life. His miraculous power, his resurrection from 
the dead, his promise of immortality, his atonement 
for sin, must not be underestimated. They have 
given him a hold on men through the imagination, 
through the hopes of the heart, and through the con- 
sciousness of sin, that an ethical life and doctrine 
alone could never have secured. All these are in- 
cluded in any adequate conception of historical 
Christianity, and without them we can have no expla- 
nation of its power in the world. 

3. I have already referred to Christ's method. 
His teachings were directed to individuals, but they 
are found in their ultimate implications to extend to 
society. The words of Christ have wonderful rever- 
berating power. Without ever speaking of society 
as an object of interest to him, he has uttered truth 
that has affected it profoundly, because it has been 
reflected from personal to public life, until the pre- 
cepts of private conduct have been reechoed as the 
laws of nations. Christ taught the need of indi- 
vidual regeneration, and history shows that the 
regeneration of men is the regeneration of society. 
Taine simply restates a very ancient Christian truth 
when he says : " History is at bottom a problem of 
psychology." 

II. 

1. Can we disentangle from the fabric of history 
those threads which have been woven into it by the 



38 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

influence of Jesus, and whose bright colors would 
not adorn it were it not for him ? It is a difficult 
and a delicate task, and though I cannot hope to 
accomplish it completely, I believe that it will be 
possible to show that much that the world most 
highly values can be directly and unerringly traced 
back to this origin. 

2. In order to exclude from notice those effects of 
Christianity that belong to the individual solely, and 
to confine ourselves to those which are strictly social, 
it will be necessary to enumerate the specific func- 
tions of society, and then to see how the influence of 
Jesus has affected them. Society is a state of asso- 
ciation for the satisfaction of three universal needs : 
(1) The need of physical comforts ; (2) the need of 
sexual companionship, and (3) the need of protection 
of rights. It performs, therefore, three functions : 
(1) The industrial, relating to means of sustaining 
or preserving men ; (2) the domestic, relating to the 
means of multiplying or producing men, and (3) the 
political, relating to means of regulating or governing 
men. 

(1) The industrial function presents two problems. 
The first is that of labor, or the production of sub- 
sistence. The second is that of wealth, or the dis- 
tribution of subsistence. These two problems were 
especially difficult to solve at the time when Christ 
came into the world, when three fourths of the popu- 
lation of Rome were enrolled paupers and the in- 
equalities which wealth had created held half the 
world in slavery. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 39 

(2) The domestic function also gives rise to two 
problems. The first is that of marriage, the con- 
dition of the increase of population, reduced to a 
merely nominal institution by the "free marriage" 
system and loose divorce laws of the Roman Empire. 
The second is education, or the development of the 
population, a truly domestic institution, since it be- 
gins in the family and is normally transferred only to 
one who stands in loco parentis. If the increase of 
life be detached from responsibility for the destiny of 
life, there can be no stable condition of society. 
For this reason education is normally a domestic 
institution. 

(3) The political function also suggests two prob- 
lems. The first is that of legislation, or the defini- 
tion of rights. The second is that of repression, or 
the enforcement of rights. 

III. 

We shall see presently something of what Chris- 
tianity has done for the solution of these vast prob- 
lems with which all great minds have struggled. 
But, first of all, let us note with what new impulse 
Christianity began its work. Its apostles moved, as 
they thought, under the mandate of a divine impera- 
tive. Called by the voice of the Eternal, they went 
forth with the weight of the universe behind them. 
No men had ever before received such a vocation, 
and none had ever before such a sense of their mis- 
sion. " Go teach all nations " implied that all nations 
could be taught ; that there were in every man, under 



40 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

a skin of whatever color, whether bond or free, a 
reason and a conscience that bore in fractured out- 
lines the lineaments of a God. No earthly conqueror 
had ever gone forth to conquer the hearts and wills 
of men. But the Apostles went upon an embassy 
that implied a new conception of man, such as before 
had entered no man's mind. Without distinction of 
race or sex or estate, men were to be taught that 
God was their Father, and were to express in a visi- 
ble symbol the washing away of the old and the 
resurrection of the new humanity. The exalted idea 
of man that went out from Judaea to change the insti- 
tutions of men was alone sufficient to reconstruct 
society and inaugurate a new epoch in the history of 
the world. 

i. (i) Spread throughout the civilized nations was 
a profound contempt for labor and the laborer. Cic- 
ero had said : " All who live by mercenary labor do a 
degrading business. No noble sentiment can come 
from a workshop." The wise Seneca, one of the 
much-lauded Stoics, had taught : " The invention of 
the arts belongs to the vilest slaves. Wisdom dwells 
in loftier regions ; she soils not her hands with 
labor." None but slaves engaged in any form of 
toil. Pauperism was widespread among the people. 
Under Augustus two hundred thousand persons were 
fed from the public granaries of Rome. Among such 
idlers, who claimed indolence as an hereditary and in- 
alienable right, Paul went to live and to earn his bread 
by manual labor. Writing to the Corinthians he 
says: "We labor, working with our own hands." 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 4 1 

And to the Thessalonians : " If any would not work, 
neither should he eat." The agitators of our day 
plead for the "rights" of labor. The disciples of 
that day were taught the "duty" of labor. In the 
"Apostolic Constitutions," Clement is reported as 
writing, " Labor according to your estate in all sanc- 
tity, in order that you may be able to succor your 
unfortunate brethren and that you may not be a 
charge to the church. We ourselves, who preach the 
word of the gospel, do not neglect labor of another 
order. Among us, some are fishers, others artisans, 
others husbandmen. We are never idle." Is it a 
wonder that in three centuries these heroic Chris- 
tians, led by such devoted leaders, even amid violent 
persecutions and subjected to cruel taxation, rose to 
wealth and pov/er in the Roman Empire and won for 
themselves the first places in the nation ? Ignatius, 
Justin, and Epiphanius give similar testimony to the 
industry of the disciples of Christ and exhort their 
brethren to emulate their example. x 

2) Thus dignified and rendered honorable by 
Christian practice, labor received a veritable " rehabili- 
tation." The fourth Council of Carthage solemnly 
decreed that " it was good that every clerk win his 
bread either by trade or by cultivating the ground." 2 
In addition to their literary studies, all candidates 
for orders were required to learn a trade. Augustine 
stirred his generation by his famous treatise " On the 

1 Const. Apost. ii, 67 ; Ignatius, Epist. vii, ad Tarsenes ; Justin, De Vita 
Christiana ; Epiphanius, Heres, Ixxx. 

2 Concil. Carthag. Ii, lii, liii. 



42 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Work of Monks," in which he demanded that none 
should be idle. Benedict intermingled labor with 
prayer, and the Benedictine order required seven 
hours of daily toil, four hours of which must be spent 
in manual labor. These monks wandered to every 
land, true missionaries of industry, and at last Europe 
was transformed from a country of idlers and paupers 
into a busy scene of honorable labor. The origin of 
the great corporations of workmen is still obscure. 
Some have professed to find traces of them in the 
capitularies of Charlemagne. - It is certain, however, 
that they grew up under the influence of Christian 
teaching and laid the foundations of organized indus- 
try throughout the world. 3 

(3) From its very inception Christianity began in 
the most effective way to undermine the almost uni- 
versal system of human slavery. To have opposed 
it directly and radically, in the circumstances that then 
existed, would have been to suppress Christianity 
itself ; but what the ultimate effect of Christianity 
must be is discernible in Paul's course with Onesimus, 
as related in his beautiful and pathetic letter to Phile- 
mon. That Paul was sensible of the dreadful curse 
of slavery there can be no doubt. " For public 
depravity to reach its utmost depths of degradation," 
says a French writer on slavery, " there needed to be 
a being with the passions and attractions of a man, 
yet stripped by public opinion of all the moral obliga- 
tions of a human being ; all whose wildest excesses 

' For the history of guilds, religious, social, and industrial, see George 
Howell's The Conflicts of Capital and Labor, chap, i. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 



43 



were lawful, provided they were commanded by a 
master. Such a being was the Roman slave." 4 But 
such a being could not long exist under Christian 
influence. Almost immediately amelioration was 
introduced into the slave's condition, enfranchise- 
ment usually followed among Christian slaveholders, 
innumerable death-bed liberations marked the effect 
of Christian tendencies, the moral sense was gradu- 
ally stirred to perception, and slavery has finally van- 
ished from the -earth in every Christian land. It was 
morally impossible that the relation of owner and 
chattel could permanently continue between Christian 
brethren. 

(4) Christianity not only gradually liberated labor 
from its yoke of bondage, but rendered it conscien- 
tious even to consecration. " Labor in all sanctity," 
says Clement, and the Christian workman began to 
sanctify his toil. The builders of the great cathedrals 
have left us examples of this sanctified workmanship. 
Not only those marvels of human construction them- 
selves, but the holy inspiration that toiled upon 
them, has Christianity given to the world. " The 
architectural investigator of the nineteenth century is 
amazed and awed," says Brace, " to discover sometimes 
on remote portions of a church of the thirteenth cen- 
tury beautifully carved stonework, with every detail 
perfect, which no human eye has seen for six hundred 
years, as if the workman had chiseled these exqui- 
site ornamentations 'for the love of God,' and not for 
the praise or hire of men. Nor does it lower the aspi- 

* Wallon, quoted by Charles Loring Brace in Gesta Christi, chap. v. 



44 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ration that, once imbued with the devotion of the age, 
the architect and builder did his work not conscious 
always of the divine, but from the habit of honest and 
reverent work taught him by his faith. It was 
simply unconscious religion in practical life." 5 

2. The pagan love of wealth was based on the idea 
that happiness consists in selfish luxury. That con- 
ception was almost universal before the time of 
Christ and long afterward among those who did not 
accept his teaching. It is still the world's idea, ex- 
cept among Christian people. Aristotle said : " The 
title of citizen belongs only to those who need not 
work to live." 6 In the ancient state, property made 
the citizen. Without it a man fell into contempt 
and was treated as an outcast, or practically sold 
himself to men of wealth and power and became 
their political tool. 

(i) The doctrine of Christ assumes the inherent 
worth and dignity of human nature, without regard 
to its externals. Neither wealth nor poverty makes a 
man greater or better in the sight of God. But a 
different idea is sometimes attributed to Christ. He 
is represented as totally condemning both riches and 
rich men. It would be difficult to show that either 
wealth itself or the accumulation of it is condemned 
by Christ. There are considerations that might even 
lead us to believe that he himself, in spite of the 
traditional view, was not wholly destitute. His say- 
ing, " The foxes have holes and the birds of the air 

5 Brace's Gesta Christi, p. 495. 

6 Aristotle's Politics, iii, 3, 2. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 



45 



have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to 
lay his head," was spoken in view of his approach- 
ing passion and has obvious reference to his having 
no place of shelter from pursuit. It was the answer 
to a "certain scribe," who had proposed, not to live 
with him in his home, but to follow him as a disciple. 
It was like his reply to the mother of Zebedee's 
children, when he asked if they could endure his 
baptism. There is no ground, therefore, for the 
inference that Christ was absolutely homeless and 
penniless. Is it impossible that out of his thirty 
years of life before the beginning of his ministry, 
Jesus had gathered enough to furnish a home for his 
widowed mother ? If Paul thought it becoming that 
he should supply his own necessities with the labor 
of his hands, is it probable that Jesus was for three 
years an absolute pensioner on public charity ? His 
tender remembrance of his mother in his dying 
agony, when he transferred his filial duties to his 
loving disciple John, with the words, " Woman, 
behold, thy son," seems to imply a previous dis- 
charge of those duties by himself during all the 
years of his ministry. And the reported words of 
Jesus do not convince us of his antipathy to wealth. 
He does not censure prudent accumulation when he 
says, " Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the 
earth," but selfish accumulation, laying up treasures 
for " yourselves," and laying them up upon the earth 
alone, instead of laying them up in heaven. " Labor 
not for the meat that perisheth " is not a prohibition 
of eating, or of acquiring food by labor, but of losing 



46 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

all thought of the lasting in toiling for the perish- 
able. These are, indeed, dissuasions from the pur- 
suit of wealth as the chief good, as the pagan world 
considered it, but not condemnations of wealth or its 
acquisition. The dangers of wealth are, however, 
made apparent. " Ye cannot serve God and Mam- 
mon." " How hardly shall they that have riches 
enter into the kingdom of God!" The difficulty is 
emphasized, but the impossibility is not asserted. 
"Woe unto you that are rich!" But if we ask 
wherefore, the answer runs, " For ye have received 
your consolation," — you have chosen a good that 
has consolation only for the present and have noth- 
ing for the future ; you have made a woeful choice. 
The evil of it Paul explains : " They that will be rich 
fall into temptation and a snare, and into many fool- 
ish and hurtful lusts which drown men in destruction 
and perdition." It is not "money" but the "love" 
of it, the misplacement of affection belonging nor- 
mally to nobler things, that is the " root of all 
evil." It is in " coveting after it " that some "have 
erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through 
with many sorrows." 

(2) Paganism said, Love wealth ; Christianity said, 
Love men. The contrast is beautifully exhibited in 
the new idea of wealth which Christ introduced into 
the world. " A man's life consisteth not in the abun- 
dance of the things which he possesseth," said Jesus. 
The world has usually thought that it does. Christ 
has led many millions to think otherwise. The 
power of the new doctrine is seen in the immediate 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 



47 



consequences of its acceptance. Of the church in 
Jerusalem we read : " And the multitude of them 
that believed were of one heart and of one soul; 
neither said any of them that aught of the things 
which he possessed was his own ; but they had all 
things in common." In ever-widening circles the 
great wave of charity has spread throughout the 
world. The consecration of wealth to the good of 
man was a wholly new idea. These words of the 
Apostolic Constitutions seem like the very charter 
of Christian charity : " To orphans take the place of 
a father ; to widows give the protection they would 
have had from their husbands ; help young people 
who desire to marry with your counsels ; find work 
for artisans ; have pity on the infirm ; receive stran- 
gers beneath your roof ; give food and drink to those 
who are hungry and thirsty, and clothes to the 
naked ; visit the sick and help the prisoners." 7 And 
note how wisely these duties are imposed. The 
absolutely helpless alone are to be provided for ; the 
young and capable are to be put in the way of self- 
help ; the accidentally unfortunate are to have their 
immediate needs supplied. Here is no indiscriminate 
and broadcast sacrifice of the rich to the poor. The 
whole movement is prompted by the recognition 
of the man, rather than the regard of circumstances ; 
everything is designed to elevate, to comfort, to 
reform, or to assist the man and to make him master 
his surroundings and rise superior to his miseries. 
If charity sometimes manifested more of sympathy 

i Const. Apost. iv, 2. 



48 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

than of discernment, we must account it a phenome- 
non very rare in the world and too creditable to the 
faith of enthusiasts to deserve severe censure. It 
is true that the Church of Rome alone supported 
more then fifteen hundred poor people, and the 
Church at Antioch, in the time of Chrysostom, 
maintained more than three thousand. It is true 
that men like Basil the Great, and Paulinus of Nola, 
and Hilary of Aries, gave their entire estates to the 
poor, and that priests sold their sacerdotal robes, aye, 
even the golden vessels of the holy communion, in 
order to feed the poor. A more discriminating sym- 
pathy established homes for widows and orphans, 
hospitals for the sick and maimed, and asylums for 
abandoned women. 8 

(3) It has sometimes been thought that Chris- 
tianity instituted and favored communistic life and 
denied the right of private property. This has been 
argued from the practice of the church at Jerusalem 
and the expressions of the early Christian Fathers. 
In the church at Jerusalem there was neither an 
authoritative community of goods nor was it intended 
for a model. It was a temporary expediency for 
meeting an emergency, when many of the disciples 
were poor, when sympathy drew all hearts together, 
and when union was essential to safety. The gifts 
were all voluntary. Ananias was not rebuked for 
retaining a part of his possessions, and his right 
to do this was expressly conceded. " Whiles it 
remained, was it not thine own? and after it was 

3 C. Schmidt's The Social Results of Early Christianity, book ii, chap. v. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 



49 



sold, was it not in thine own power ? Why hast 
thou conceived this thing in thy heart ? Thou hast 
not lied unto men, but unto God." And throughout 
the whole thrilling narrative there is no slightest 
intimation that the right of property was brought 
in question. It has been affirmed that the Fathers 
openly and strongly deny the right of private pos- 
session. Their words do, indeed, seem to imply 
this. 9 Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome, Ambrose, and 
Clement all employ language that sounds communis- 
tic ; and yet I feel confident that, however revolu- 
tionary single sentences may sound when abstracted 
from their setting, they were intended as merely 
rhetorical appeals to practical charity or the high 
colors in pictures of an ideal state. Clement of 
Alexandria wrote a special treatise to prove that 
" poverty is not essential to salvation, that riches are 
not a reason for exclusion from the kingdom of God, 
and that it would be irrational to suppose that Chris- 
tianity demands the renunciation of property, be- 
cause in that case beggars would be the best of the 
faithful, which is contradicted by experience." 10 

8 As examples of the apparently communistic utterances of the Christian 
Fathers, take the following : — 

" The rich man is a thief." — Saint Basil. " The rich are robbers ; a kind 
of equality must be effected by making gifts out of their abundance. Bet- 
ter all things were in common." — Saint Chrysostom. " Opulence is always 
the product of theft, committed, if not by the actual possessor, by his ances- 
tors." — Saint Jerome. "Nature created community; private property is 
the offspring of usurpation." — Saint Ambrose. "In strict justice, every- 
thing should belong to all. Iniquity alone has created private property." — 
Saint Clement. Quoted from Bossuet by Laveleye in The Socialism of 
To-day, introduction. But see the references below. 

la Quis Dives Salvetur, vol. ii, p. 935, of the writings of Clement. See 
also the references cited by Schmidt, op. cit., where Augustine, Ambrose, 



5° 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



Christianity taught mankind to endure poverty with- 
out despair, and to possess riches without sensuality 
and pride. It has taught the needy not to envy the 
rich, and the wealthy not to oppress the poor. It 
has done more than any other influence that ever 
touched the life of man to obliterate those class- 
distinctions which create strife and bitterness in 
the human heart, and have made discord and misery 
where peace and happiness should reign. 

3. (1) Without doubt no single cause so under- 
mined and disturbed the welfare of ancient society 
as the relations between the sexes that paganism 
developed and fostered. Marriage, before Christian- 
ity modified the life of woman and the opinion in 
which she was universally held, was considered a 
necessary evil, whose end was the gratification of 
passion and the perpetuation of the state. It had 
fallen into such discredit that celibacy had to be 
heavily taxed, in order to sustain the growth of pop- 
ulation ; and illicit relations had rendered excep- 
tional the chastity of men and almost universal the 
debasement of women. In Rome the home had 
ceased to exist. Woman was a helpless dependent 
either under her father's care or her husband's 
power. Her only hope of freedom lay either in the 
life of a courtesan or in those "free marriages," 
enduring at the option of the parties, which custom 
had made the most common kind in Rome. Given 
in marriage without her consent, expelled from her 

Jerome, Paulinus of Nola, and many other writers of the early Church teach 
that riches are not to be condemned in themselves, chap. v. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 5 I 

husband's house upon the slightest pretext, deprived 
of partnership in his wealth, under the tutelage of 
his male relatives, without other education than that 
derived by contact with her family, the companion of 
eunuchs and female slaves, confined to the house as 
to a prison, treated as a ministrant to lust and passion, 
valued only as the necessary agent for the perpetua- 
tion of the race, timorous or frivolous or tyrannical 
as her circumstances made her, with no attractions 
but those of nature, inevitably lost with nature's 
decay, without love and respect, — the pagan woman 
was an object so pitiable that it was often thought 
a mercy to destroy her life in infancy. It is the 
voice of pagan antiquity, rather than the individual 
censor Metellus Numidius, that utters the words 
which he pronounced before the assembled people : 
" If nature had allowed us to be without women, we 
should have been relieved of very troublesome 
companions." u 

(2) It is sometimes thought that the increased 
respect for women, the elevation of conjugal affec- 
tion, and the higher standard of personal purity 
which the subsequent centuries reveal, are attribu- 
table to that chastity and esteem for the gentler sex 
which Tacitus and others discovered and praised 
among the Germanic races. A very moderate 
degree of virtue might easily excite the astonishment 
of a Roman in the age of Tacitus. A high degree 
of personal devotion may well be accorded to Ger- 
man women, but polygamy was not unknown among 

11 Quoted by Aulus Gellius, Opera, i, 6. 



52 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

the early Germans, the jealousy and tyranny of 
husbands often amounted to absolute cruelty, and 
woman in Germany was and has been ever since, 
with some modifications through Christian influence, 
the faithful slave of man. Wives were bought and 
adultery was compounded by the purchase of another 
wife. Brutality was common in the treatment of 
women, and even to-day the bearing of burdens, 
subjection to the husband, and physical punishment 
for conjugal offences continue to be customary in 
Germany more conspicuously than in other lands. 12 
(3) But it was impossible that the being who had 
borne the world a Saviour could continue to be de- 
spised and cruelly treated by those who loved and 
trusted him. The Blessed Virgin became a holy 
image in the eyes of the Christian world. The doc- 
trines of Christ made no distinction of sex. All 
were equal before God. Even more responsively 
than man's, the loving heart of woman turned to the 
warmth and light of the gospel. Oppressed and 
overburdened, despised and spurned, the fine sensi- 
bilities and large capacities of affection, that centuries 
of degradation had not destroyed, awoke to a flame 
of sincere love and adoration, and the disciples of 
Christ included more women than men. Not only 
the high ideal of purity, the rigid laws of divorce, 
and the tender regard for children, all claiming a 
divine authority, but the sweet spiritual companion- 
ship strengthened and perfected the conjugal tie. 

12 For the position of woman under the Germanic tribes, see the full treat- 
ment in chapter xi of Brace's Gesta Christi. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 



53 



For the first time, souls, immortal in their union, 
were wedded. Marriage was no longer looked upon 
as a social function merely, as it is in a state of 
nature. It typified the union of Christ and his pure 
bride, the Church. It was celebrated at the altar 
with the benediction of Christ's minister, it opened 
new fountains of intercourse and sympathy, it cre- 
ated the home with its Bible and its daily prayers, 
it spread a table upon which God's blessing was 
invoked to rest, it demanded faithfulness and devo- 
tion and propriety and gentleness, it was indissoluble 
in its nature, it led to companionship in the endless 
ages of a coming life, it found its fruition in immor- 
tal beings and holy hopes by the birth of children. 
Never upon the earth did a more stupendous change 
take place in human society, than when the first 
Christian bridegroom led the first Christian bride to 
the altar, touching her hand and gazing upon her 
face, as if they might be the holy habitation of the 
Mother of God herself ! 

4. (1) It is evident that Christianity places a high 
value upon childhood. The love of children was a 
Hebrew virtue. But the whole spirit of Christianity 
dignifies and exalts the child. The affections awak- 
ened in the hearts of Christian parents, the beautiful 
images presented by the history of the Saviour's own 
nativity, the touching picture of his blessing little 
children, his expressed desire that they might be 
suffered to come to him, and his requirement in 
believers of childlike docility and trustfulness, all 
combined to deepen and refine the regard for chil- 



54 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



dren. The rights of childhood found recognition 
with the introduction of Christianity. The paternal 
power had before allowed the father unlimited 
authority over his child, including the right to expose 
him to death at birth, to sell him as a slave, and to 
take his life. The weak and the superfluous children, 
and especially the girls, were often abandoned in this 
manner. Whoever found the child might retain it 
and rear it as a slave. If sound in body, this was 
usually its fate. A curious revelation of the incon- 
sistency of men is found in the fact that the famous 
words of Terence, which evoked thunders of ap- 
plause from the Roman audience that listened to his 
play, — " I am a man ; nothing pertaining to man do 
I think foreign from me," — are contained in a 
comedy whose plot turns upon the survival of an 
infant daughter commanded to be exposed to death 
by the very man who uttered this sentence. 13 

(2) The education of children was not neglected 
by antiquity, but it was by no means universal. 
The most careful education was found among the 
Hebrews. Greek education aimed at aesthetic cul- 
ture, but confined it entirely to the few, mostly 
excluding women and slaves, who made up most of 
the population. Roman education was likewise re- 
stricted and had no higher ideal than fitness for 
political citizenship. " The education of paganism," 

13 See the Heauton-timorumenos of Terence. The line " Homo sum ; 
humani nihil a me alienum puto," according to Augustine, moved the whole 
audience — -though many of the spectators were rude and ignorant — to 
thunders of applause. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 55 

says an able historian of education, " was imperfect. 
It was controlled by wrong principles and confined 
within too narrow limits. It did not grasp the worth 
of the individual in its fullness. It never freed 
itself from the narrowness of national character. . . . 
But with the advent of Christ into the world, there 
came a new era in history." 14 Dr. William T. Harris, 
speaking of this subject, says: "The influence of 
such an idea as that of the divine-human God conde- 
scending to assume the sorrows and trials of mortal 
life, all for the sake of the elevation of individual 
souls, the humblest and weakest as well as the 
mightiest and most exalted, is potent to transform 
civilization." 15 Henceforth, the life of a child is 
valued as a precious treasure, and the shaping of its 
destiny is the noblest work of man. 

(3) The Roman Empire enjoyed an organized sys- 
tem of public schools, founded by the emperors, and 
endowed by such statesmen as Hadrian, Marcus 
Aurelius, Vespasian, and Theodosius. They ex- 
tended throughout all the cities of the empire. The 
early Christians availed themselves of them ; but as 
they were intended to impart an education whose end 
was the State, and as their studies consisted mainly 
in the reading of pagan authors, schools of catechu- 
mens were founded to prepare candidates for bap- 
tism. With the invasion of the Franks, the imperial 
schools were closed. After an interval during which 
there seems to have been little but domestic instruc- 

14 F. V. N. Painter's History of Education, chap. iii. 

15 See the preface to the work last cited. 



56 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

tion, the Church instituted an educational revival. 
The Church councils from the sixth century on to 
the time of Charlemagne repeatedly urge the estab- 
lishment of parish and monastic schools, which seem 
to have been opened in great numbers. The palace- 
school of Charlemagne in which the great Alcuin 
taught, and others founded under his direction, are 
well known in history. The foundations of the great 
universities were at length laid by the Church. The 
imperfection of all these educational efforts we can- 
not fail to recognize, but we must not forget the 
world's indebtedness to them. Christianity, as such, 
has never antagonized learning, but has proved its 
most faithful guardian. Besides the conservation of 
such knowledge as the ancient world possessed, 
Christianity has contributed an element wholly new in 
the training of the young. It has impressed upon 
men the value of the individual and striven to secure 
his perfection of himself by the development of 
character and the pursuit of moral ideals. It has 
also trained the human mind to habits of introspec- 
tion and self-analysis that lie at the basis of all true 
philosophy and without which the scientific spirit 
itself would possess neither form nor impulse. 

5. The moral and intellectual changes of a people 
soon show themselves in legislation. Even under 
the pagan emperors, Christianity began its' amelio- 
rating and elevating influence upon the laws. The 
subject presents too many details for our narrow 
limits, but deserves a special study in such works as 
" Gesta Christi," by Charles Loring Brace, and "The 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 



57 



Social Results of Early Christianity," by Professor 
Schmidt, of Strasburg, with their extensive refer- 
ences to authorities. I can simply enumerate a few 
of the most significant of these moral victories in 
the field of legislation. 

(i) The earliest and most important effect was 
upon personal status. Constantine removed the 
paternal power of life and death and rendered the 
killing of a child a crime equal to parricide. He 
also extended the son's rights of property. Julian 
forbade immoderate penalties to be inflicted upon 
children. Daughters were endowed with heirship. 
Divorce was restricted to a few causes, as when a 
husband is a murderer, a magician, or a violator of 
tombs, or the wife an adultress or guilty of evil prac- 
tices. Civil equality was established between hus- 
band and wife, and adultery was punished with death. 
Chastity was required by the laws of Justinian, 
though he weakened again the legislation on divorce. 
The unnatural vices so frequent in antiquity that 
Cicero said it was a disgrace not to indulge in them, 
vices unnamed and unknown in the modern Christian 
world, were severely punished under Theodosius. 
Numerous ameliorations were introduced into the 
life of the slave. To poison or throw him to wild 
beasts was made homicide. Liberty was declared 
inalienable, so that no free child could become a 
slave. The marriage relation between slaves was 
regarded as indissoluble by separation. Every facility 
for liberating slaves became the policy of the law. 
Under Basil (867) the slaves of a master whose 



58 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

property reverted to the State became free ; for so 
ran the law : " It would be an outrage to the holiness 
of God, to the wisdom of the prince, and to the 
conscience of man, not to permit the death of the 
master to break the yoke of servitude." 16 

(2) The laws relating to personal conduct were 
equally revolutionized. The stranger, who had always 
been considered an enemy by the German tribes be- 
fore their conversion, the wrecked at sea, who had been 
regarded as legitimate prey, and whose vessels were 
sometimes lured to destruction upon the rocks for 
the sake of booty, were brought within the protection 
of justice. Private feuds, which had raged from gen- 
eration to generation, requiring the avenging of 
blood by a member of the family, were commuted by 
payments of money or adjusted by judicial tribunals. 
"The Peace of God" waved the white flag of truce 
over bloody battlefields and called the combatants 
to the silent hush of prayer. Earlier than this the 
horrible conflicts of the gladiators had been brought 
to a termination. Honorius vainly tried to stop 
these inhuman shows by the degradation of the 
gladiatorial profession. At last (404) an eastern 
monk, Telemachus, crossed the seas, and at Rome 
threw himself into the arena between the swords of 
the contestants. The fury of the crowd demanded 
his immediate death, but his blood was the last that 
flowed from human veins in that Flavian amphithea- 

i6 A very discriminating and compendious estimate of the influence of 
Christianity upon Roman legislation may be found in Morey's Outlines of 
Roman Law, period iv, chap. ii. 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DOME? 59 

tre, whose silent, crumbling walls stand as a monu- 
ment to this fearless martyr. An imperial edict 
suppressed this cruel sport forever. 17 

6. We can barely mention the amelioration of 
punishment that Christianity has introduced. " No 
classic legislator, so far as we can recall," says Brace, 
"had ever cared for that unfortunate class — the 
prisoners." Prison reform began under Constantine. 
The accused were to be examined without delay, they 
were to be treated in a humane manner, persons 
under arrest were not to be tortured, and prisons 
were required to have air and light. Paul's confine- 
ment in that gloomy, subterranean Mamertine prison 
at Rome may have been, in part, in its results, vica- 
rious suffering for the accused of the future. In all 
of this was that exalted view of man which Christ 
had taught, and God's image was not to be marred. 
" Let those who are condemned," reads a sentence 
of Constantine's, " not be branded on the forehead, 
that the majesty of the face formed in the image of 
celestial beauty be not dishonored." 18 But the glory 
of Christianity is not shown in prison reform, ancient 
or modern, though it is great, so much as in the 
changed theory of all punitive treatment. The re- 
form and salvation of the criminal are aims exclu- 
sively Christian in their origin. If the sentiment of 
our age has adopted them as its ideals in punish- 
ment, it is because of that latent and unconscious 
Christianity that is working like leaven in the hearts 

17 Theodoret, Historia Ecclesiastica, v, 26. 

18 Codex Theodosii, liber xv, title 8, 1. 



60 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of men, even while their lips are framing a denial of 
its presence. 

We cannot linger longer to recount what Chris- 
tianity has done for society. If any think that much 
of our social progress can be attributed to other 
causes, a survey of the non-Christian world will dis- 
pel that illusion. Wherever Christian influence has 
not penetrated, the pre-Christian social conditions 
still exist. Something depends upon natural temper- 
ament, indeed, in the reformation of racial character- 
istics, and few vices or defects of social life are 
universal. But nowhere is there a true conception 
of human worth and dignity, where Christ's teach- 
ings have not been felt. A contempt for labor, with 
its accompaniment of human servitude ; the regard 
of caste and class-distinctions, with violent contrasts 
of wealth and poverty unmodified by pity and 
charity ; the degradation of woman and disregard of 
personal chastity ; the indifference to children and 
their continuance in ignorance and vice ; the in- 
equality of legislation and the dominion of personal 
hate and cruel revenge, — these are the social phe- 
nomena with which we expect to meet whenever we 
overstep the boundaries of Christian lands and enter 
the regions where the life and doctrines of Jesus are 
unknown. 

That his power is not greater than it is among 
ourselves is testimony to the magnitude of the work 
his teaching has accomplished in the world ; for it 
has met with the same and even greater obstacles, 
and yet it has triumphantly surmounted them in its 



WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE? 6 1 

steady but not unimpeded progress. When we con- 
sider how, in these centuries, it has changed the life 
and institutions of society; how it has given labor a 
rehabilitation, consecrated wealth to human benefit, 
honored and ennobled woman, crowned the head of 
childhood with the coronet of love and knowledge, 
swept away traces of barbarism from the codes of 
law and tempered them with justice and mercy, let 
sunlight and hope into the cells of the prison and 
broken the fetters of the slave, — may we not look 
for its solution of the passing problems of the pres- 
ent, for its Author has said : " Lo, I am with you 
alway, even unto the end of the world " ? 



III. 

CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS 
OF LABOR. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF LABOR. 



I. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY, 
i. Eras of Industrial Progress : 
(i) The Era of Hunting; 

(2) The Era of Cattle Raising ; 

(3) The Era of Agriculture ; 

(4) The Era of the Mechanic Arts. 

2. The Correlation of Wants and Wealth. 

3. The Causes of Wealth and Labor. 

4. Progressive and Improgressive Labor. 

5. The Division of Labor. 

6. The Invention of Machinery. 

II. THE CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS OF LABOR. 

1. The Problem of Increasing Wealth. 

(1) Is the Increase of Wealth Desirable? 

(2) Wealth but a Means to Life as an End. 

(3) The Increase of the Laborer's Productivity. 

(4) The Avoidance of Waste. 

2. The Problem of the Laborer's Rights. 

(1) The Foundation of Human Rights. 

(2) The Right to Self and One's Powers. 

(3) The Right to the Product of One's Powers. 

(4) Wealth as a Social Product. 

(5) The Ground of Taxation. 

(6) The Right of Property. 

(7) The Right of Property in Land. 

(8) The Universal Stewardship. 



III. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF LABOR. 

I. 

i". The first problem of society is that of subsist- 
ence, or the production of those commodities that 
contribute to life. The first cry of every human 
being is the bitter wail of hunger. But, as for each 
individual added to our race provision is made, with- 
out his own exertion, for the satisfaction of his earli- 
est needs, so also it was in the infancy of humanity 
for the first wants of our species. Originating, prob- 
ably, in some fertile and temperate region of south- 
ern Asia, the first men were able to satisfy their 
hunger with the spontaneous fruits of the generous 
earth, and a genial sky rendered superfluous both 
clothing and habitations. I know not how great pro- 
gress in the tilling of the earth the biblical narrative 
intends to ascribe to the Adam of Genesis, but its 
own subsequent account of the origin of metallurgy 
justifies our belief that the Edenic implements were 
of a very primitive character. 

(i) In the course of the migration and dispersion 
of men, in which the command to " multiply and 
replenish the earth " was executed, impinging of the 
population upon the food-supply, as well as the rigors 



66 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of more severe climates, involved the use of the 
flesh of animals for food and of their skins for cloth- 
ing, while caves in the earth, natural or artificial, 
afforded the protection of dwellings. Thus men 
found themselves existing in the era of hunting. 

(2) The perception of the waste involved and the 
uncertainty of a sufficient supply, when animals were 
killed at random in a wild state, must early have sug- 
gested their domestication, and we may picture to 
ourselves the patriarchal family with its flocks and 
herds roaming over the pasture-lands, subsisting prin- 
cipally upon the fatlings of the flocks and dwelling 
in the movable tents adapted to the nomadic life of 
the era of cattle-raising. 

(3) Again, the physical requirements of the growth 
of population, coupled with contentions arising con- 
cerning the occupation of the soil, like that reported 
between Abraham and Lot, ultimately introduced 
the permanent demarkation of the land into separate 
holdings, and the establishment of villages for resi- 
dence. This necessitated the cultivation of the more 
limited apportionment of the soil, in order to produce 
by art what was not afforded by nature, and thus 
began the agricultural era. 

(4) Finally, the exigencies of defence against the 
encroachment of hostile neighbors, together with the 
demand for agricultural implements, required the 
equipment of armies, the erection of walled towns 
for refuge, the construction of engines of war and the 
working of metals, with its attendant division of 
labor and organization of military, civil, and political 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 6 J 

institutions, which characterize the era of mechanic 
arts. The arts thus rendered necessary, after re- 
maining for centuries subsidiary to the ends which 
first called them into being, have at last been brought 
to minister directly and chiefly to the desires of the 
people ; the militant spirit has become secondary to 
the industrial, and the principal trait of contempo- 
rary society is the industrialism that creates its enor- 
mous wealth and whose interests evoke its highest 
solicitude. 

2. Civilization begins in man's needs and is meant 
to afford him satisfaction. He is never quite satis- 
fied, and yet he is not of necessity unhappy in any 
stage of his industrial progress. The growth of his 
wants is correlated to the increase of his wealth. 
The sight of wealth produces new wants. The Paci- 
fic Islanders are not dissatisfied with life. Contact 
with civilized men, however, often generates in them 
new desires and material civilization moves along this 
line of new wants created by the desire of new 
wealth. 

It is universally conceded that men were never in 
the history of the world so well supplied with com- 
modities of every kind as they are to-day. The fact 
is capable of statistical proof, but it is too apparent 
to require the time and trouble. 1 The cause of the 
present industrial discontent is the confrontation of 
wealth and poverty, with its startling contrast of 

1 For the statistical proof of this statement see Giffen's Progress of the 
Working Classes, pp. 5, 26 ; Stebbin's Progress from Poverty, pp. 7, 9, and 
PP- 3°. 33 1 and Mulhall's History of Prices, pp. 130, 133. 



68 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

luxury on the one side and misery on the other. 
Men who work as common laborers to-day enjoy 
more of the physical comforts of life than the men 
and women who landed on Plymouth Rock. They 
are not so happy or so contented, and the reason is 
that they think they have not their fair proportion 
of wealth. 

3. The ultimate cause of wealth is labor, in its 
wide sense of human activity for the satisfaction of 
wants. This is an economic commonplace. But 
the economists seldom discuss the question, What is 
the cause of labor ? Mallock says it is the desire 
for social inequality. 2 This is a true but not a com- 
plete answer. Men labor primarily to sustain exist- 
ence. When they have the means of doing this, 
they cease from labor, unless they have an additional 
impulse. They have this in the desire of social 
inequality. They see others enjoying more than 
themselves. They desire to rise into the superior 
class. This desire renders them industrious and 
economical. By more exertion and less immediate 
indulgence they hope to arrive at a superior condition. 
Progress has followed this line. It results in the 
acquisition of commodities and possessions that 
elevate one's estate. Such accumulations are " cap- 
ital," because they are not only the products of the 
"head" {caput), but constitute a "head," or source, 
of further advantage. 

4. If we ask in what manner capital is produced, 
we find that it is not simply the product of labor, but 

2 Mallock's Social Equality, chap. iv. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 69 

of a particular kind of labor. There is labor which 
is wholly im progressive, whose whole result is neces- 
sary for the subsistence of the worker. A man who 
employs the whole day hunting his dinner with a bow 
and arrow in the forest never acquires any capital. 
He consumes the product of his day's labor and in 
the morning must resume his hunting. But there is 
another kind of labor. It is progressive. The man 
who invents a trap may catch every day what will 
last for two days. He may give away the subsist- 
ence of one day to another man who is willing to use 
the time for his service. All capital is the result of 
this kind of labor. It requires some skill. The 
more skilful it is, the more capital it will produce. 
A man with a very fertile brain devises ways to obtain 
in one day the food for many days. This gives him 
command over as many men who are capable only of 
improgressive labor as he can feed. They would as 
soon serve him as to hunt food. If he assures them 
subsistence in advance and with certainty, they will 
probably prefer the certainty of subsistence from 
him to the uncertainty of subsistence without him. 
His knowledge and enterprise make him a master. 
Looking back over human history we are compelled 
to refer all industrial progress and all increase of 
wealth to such enterprise and knowledge. Civil- 
ization has been rendered possible through the 
improvement of men. Universal ignorance gives us 
savagery, idleness, and famine. Intelligent chiefs 
give us barbarism, slavery, and poverty. An edu- 
cated class gives us civilization, free labor, and plenty. 



7o 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



Educated masses give us enlightenment, organized 
labor, and abundance. Universal education will give 
us refinement, intellectualized labor, and wealth. If 
we examine these superimposed planes of social exist- 
ence we shall see that the elevation of man has in- 
creased wealth ; that the ascent of man has produced 
the multiplication of his possessions ; that a condition 
of ignorance is a state in which the mind values tilings 
only, and that a condition of universal education is a 
state in which the chief value is placed on man. I 
infer, therefore, that the influence that has done 
most to emphasize the value of man and afford an 
elevated conception of his nature, is the influence 
that has done most to create the wealth of the world. 
That influence, we have already seen, is the influ- 
ence of Jesus. I take it to be a principal cause of 
the world's wealth. The conclusion is justified by 
the fact that the wealthiest nations of the earth are 
the Christian nations. This leads me to think that 
Christianity has an important relation to the prob- 
lems of labor. 

5. A principal cause of wealth is the division of 
labor. It is based on the variation of aptitude and 
ability to accomplish results and the apportionment of 
tasks to those adapted to them. Its beginnings are 
too remote for discovery, but we may readily imagine 
them in the first human family. Man would natu- 
rally undertake the heavier and more active work of 
securing food. Woman would assume the lighter 
task of its preparation, in conjunction with the 
maternal care of children. But our knowledge of 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 



71 



savage life does not warrant this natural assumption. 
Among the savage peoples we invariably find the 
whole burden of labor thrown upon woman, the 
least qualified to bear it, while man spends his days 
in idle enjoyment. When the plane of existence 
is reached where more labor is necessary, in order 
to supply a greater number of wants, we find that 
those who labor are again not the strongest, but the 
weakest, the slaves, whose inferior powers render 
them the more easily reduced to subjection. If we 
examine history, so far as it throws light upon the 
subject, we discover everywhere the same abnormal 
phenomenon — the strong idle, and the weak com- 
pelled to labor. The only exception is met when 
we reach those times and those lands where the 
influence of Christ has been felt. There we find 
labor accounted honorable, woman more generally 
released from the burdens of toil, slaves progress- 
ively liberated from servitude, and strong, free men 
voluntarily joining in the "rehabilitation of labor." 
But compulsory labor is the least progressive and the 
least enterprising kind. All truly progressive labor 
is free. Accordingly, we find the lands and times 
that have endured the curse of slavery suffering also 
from the curse of poverty. From this, also, I infer 
that the influence of Jesus is a vital element in the 
labor and industrial life of the world. 

6. Another factor in the production of wealth is 
the improvement of tools, the invention of machines, 
and the application of natural forces to production 
or invention. It creates at one stroke a power that 



72 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



is equivalent to a thousand men. It extends the 
emancipation of the slave by freeing men from the 
slavery of muscular toil. It multiplies the commod- 
ities of life until those that in former days were 
the luxuries of the few become the universal posses- 
sions of the people. This is the result of progressive, 
not at all of improgressive, labor. It gives to every 
one, who has anything to buy with, an unearned 
increment for his money too great for estimation. 
We read of the "unearned increment of land" and 
of the " unearned increment of capital." There is 
also an immense "unearned increment of labor." 
I do not say that all the inventions of our modern 
era were conceived with the sole purpose of lighten- 
ing the burdens of men, but it is an incontestable 
fact that thousands of them have originated from 
the desire that a difficult and wearisome work might 
be made easier. It can, however, be justly main- 
tained that inventions would be wholly without 
motive of any kind under conditions of slavery. 
The master has never cared to apply his intelligence 
for lightening the burden of slaves, and the slave 
could not thus lighten his burden. The psychology 
of progress explains the history of progress. If non- 
Christian lands have produced no labor-saving 
machinery, it is because oppression did not care, 
and servitude had not the power, to lighten human 
toil. For this reason, again, I affirm that the influ- 
ence of Jesus is the life of industry. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 



II. 



73 



There are two contemporary problems of labor 
that deserve our consideration. They are the prob- 
lem of increasing wealth and the problem of the 
laborer's rights. 

i. Is it desirable to continue the increase of 
wealth and how can it be increased, if desirable ? 
(i) The acquisitive faculty in man does not hesitate 
to answer the first part of this double question in 
the affirmative. Yes, wealth is good, men generally 
respond. And what has Christianity to say ? Is it 
possible that Christianity can be a principal cause in 
the production of wealth, as we have shown it to be, 
and at the same time censure that increase ? Un- 
doubtedly Christ rebukes rich men for their greed, 
and reminds them that material wealth is not the 
highest good, but does he anywhere condemn the 
multiplication of commodities to be used for the well- 
being of man ? I have failed to find in his doctrines 
any such condemnation. On the contrary, it is 
everywhere assumed by him that material goods are 
really good. Lazarus was in pitiable lack of them, 
and Dives had the full enjoyment of them, and 
Christ recognizes the fact that the condition of Dives 
was a more desirable condition than that of Lazarus, 
apart from the moral qualities and relations of the 
two men. The shame of the contrast was that Laza- 
rus lacked while Dives was without compassion. If 
one may be "diligent in business," and at the same 
time "serving the Lord," the fruits of diligence cannot 



74 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



be morally undesirable. It is impossible for men to 
develop their higher powers, to find opportunity for 
self-improvement, to realize the conditions of health 
and beneficence, without the possession of some 
measure of wealth. Wealth, then, is good, its 
increase is desirable, from a Christian point of view. 
(2) But there is an important limitation of this 
truth. Wealth is a means, not an end. The whole 
truth is expressed in the words of Christ : " A man's 
life consisteth not in the abundance of the things 
that he possesseth." The really wealthy man is not 
the man who has most, but the man who can use most, 
who can make things most subsidiary to his life, who 
most completely realizes his own and other's weal. 
Christ enlarges, ennobles, and transfigures the con- 
ception of wealth. The lower conception excludes all 
that is noblest, by excluding all that is really human. 
Possession is a graded and an evanescent power. The 
barn-builder of Christ's parable never completed his 
granaries. No matter what material transformation 
it undergoes, wealth can never be preserved unless it 
contributes to life. The sooner it does so the better. 
Not necessarily to be immediately consumed, but to 
be made the instrument of life. A workshop or a 
library enters into life, if it be rightly placed, but a 
pile of unused gold is no better than a pile of unused 
stones. It may be riches, but it is not wealth. But 
neither is the workshop or the library wealth, unless 
skilful hands or active minds come into relation with 
them. There is the ring of Christ's own truth in 
Ruskin's words : " There is no wealth but life ; life, 



CHRISTIANITY AND IABOR. 75 

with its powers of love, of joy, of admiration. That 
country is the richest which nourishes the greatest 
number of noble and happy human beings ; that man 
is richest who, having perfected the functions of his 
own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful 
influence, both personal and by means of his posses- 
sions, over the lives of others." 3 

(3) The increase of wealth is best realized by 
whatever increases the productivity of the laborer. 
Whatever lifts a man out of the sphere of improgress- 
ive labor and places him on the plane of progressive 
labor, increases wealth. It does it directly by enlarg- 
ing his life, and indirectly by making him a creator 
of wealth. This idea is entering into the minds of 
business men as they ponder over these problems of 
labor. Says a recent writer on this subject, after a 
survey of the history of industry : " Labor must be 
treated at least as well as any other source of power. 
A steam-engine is well housed, well fed with fuel, 
well oiled, and well governed by a competent engi- 
neer. For its economic use, it must work smoothly 
and continuously. We must supply it with all that 
its material constitution requires. The economic use 
of the horse demands that he be well fed, well 
housed, and well treated. We must supply him with 
all that his physical nature demands for its healthy 
working. In like manner, the economic use of the 
man requires that all the conditions of his wellbeing 
shall be respected. His physical nature must be 
supported by good food, clean and comfortable hous- 

3 Ruskin's Unto This Last, Essay iv, Ad Valorem. 



76 OCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ing, and all other good sanitary conditions ; but he 
has an intellectual being as well ; its health must be 
provided for by education, by the literature, at least, 
of his business ; for he is a moral power, sensitive to 
right and wrong. He must be influenced to right 
and withdrawn from wrong, or you will have a 
destroyer, not a worker. But is the economic ground 
the only one on which this equitable treatment of 
the laborer is necessary ? Nay, this man is your 
brother." 4 I know a village in Pennsylvania, owned 
by a family of Christian men, where all these princi- 
ples, and even more extended applications of them 
than is here suggested, have been in practice for 
years. The neat houses with their pretty gardens 
and flowers in the windows, with instruments of 
music in the spare-rooms, the neat schoolhouse and 
commodious church, have been built for the workmen 
upon a model plan. During a period when other fac- 
tories of like kind were almost universally closed on 
account of low prices, this community went steadily 
on with its manufacture. No man left work on 
account of lowered wages, no time was lost, and at the 
end the goods were ready for the high market for 
which they had been reserved. Experience has in 
that establishment added its evidence to faith, that 
care for the workman brings its own reward. I need 
not add that the proprietors are Christian men and 
believe that Christian principles have relation to 
industrial problems. 

4 The Labor Problem, edited by W. E. Barnes, chap, ii, by J. A. Water- 
worth. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 



77 



(4) Another element in the increase of wealth is 
the avoidance of waste. This opens a broad subject. 
It is impossible to treat it exhaustively. There is, 
first of all, the waste of war and its accessories. It 
is probably true that standing armies and navies are 
necessary in the present political condition of the 
world, and that the most certain way to preserve 
peace is to have well-trained soldiers and officers and 
implements of destruction so terrific that the mere 
thought of their destructiveness is sufficient to pre- 
vent their actual employment. But, at the same 
time, the cost of sustaining a nation on a war-footing 
is so enormous that it is a serious drainage on indus- 
try. First, vast numbers of men are abstracted from 
the ranks of labor to serve as soldiers and officers, 
and then, besides their support, the preparation of 
costly munitions of war is required of those who are 
left for actual production. Within the last thirty 
years the debts of the governments of Europe have 
increased nine billions of dollars. This is owing to 
four great wars which have had no connection with 
the rights or progress of man, but have been waged 
to maintain the "balance of power." The present 
aggregate debts are twenty billions. The armies and 
navies and interest on debts absorb fourteen hundred 
millions annually, of which only a fraction is neces- 
sary. The combined cost of civil service and educa- 
tion is about one fourth of the cost of this luxury of 
the "balance of power." This superfluity is an ex- 
action of twenty-seven dollars from each laborer and 
of forty-five dollars from each family of five. In Italy 



7 8 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

it abstracts fifty dollars, in England sixty-two dol- 
lars, and in France sixty-five dollars from each family. 
It is a cruel wrong. Christianity applied to practice 
would have saved it. It would have settled the wars 
by arbitration and capitalized their cost as public 
wealth. The United States presents the picture of 
a federation of commonwealths with greater territo- 
rial extent than that of Europe, without standing 
armies, and with a navy that is a mere jest. The 
civil war cost more than the purchase of the slaves 
would have required, to take no account of blood 
and suffering. The settlement of our claim against 
England by Christian methods is one of the triumphs 
of human history. Christianity would carry the 
same method into industrial warfare, the perpetual 
struggle that at once embitters and demoralizes men 
and impedes the creation of wealth. It declares that 
industry is not, in its ideal, a selfish struggle for 
existence, a desperate battle of landlord and tenant, 
of employer and employed, a conflict of interests 
that forever clash and tend to annihilate one another. 
It indicates how this problem of wealth-creation can 
be solved and the only method of solution. It says 
to arrogant landlordism, your true interest lies in 
having happy and prosperous tenants ; to envious 
labor, your hope rests in a universal progress led by 
enterprise and sustained by capital ; to mercenary 
capital, your security and permanence depend upon 
the activity of labor and the pacific participation of 
all in its rewards ; to avaricious enterprise, your 
dreams of fortune can become realities only when 



CHRISTIANITY AND TAB OR. Jg 

large classes of men are able to enjoy your products. 
Therefore, cease the strife which, however it may 
end, must eventuate in some one's overthrow, and 
the emergence from the smoke of desolation of the 
more pathetic question, What shall society do with 
the vanquished ? 

2. Perhaps a deeper problem, and one more 
difficult to solve than that of increasing wealth, is 
the problem of the laborer's rights, (i) I say the 
"laborers rights," because there are no "rights of 
labor." Rights belong only to persons, to men as 
moral beings. And whatever "rights" the laborer 
has, he has in virtue of his manhood, not in virtue of 
his labor. It is difficult to escape class distinctions 
and the idea of class privileges. Rights do not be- 
long to classes, but to men. What is it in a man 
that entitles him to rights ? It is the capacity for 
duty. He is a being whose nature has ends ; it is his 
duty to realize those ends, and he is morally free to 
realize them. Suppose he does not. Then he does 
not realize his manhood. Manhood is not a mechani- 
cal product of nature. Nature furnishes capacities 
and faculties, but manhood is the self-determined 
product of the man himself. To realize manhood, 
one must be free. The essence of personality is 
freedom. Rights inhere in personality, because it is 
free, because it has duties, because it has an end to 
realize. This cannot be said of any creature lower 
than man. Such a creature is not an end, but a 
means. Its purpose of being is not realized in itself. 
Man is lord over the lower creatures ; bound, no 



8o SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

doubt, to exercise his lordship in a truly lordly way, 
in a way comporting with his rational nature and not 
like a brute, but still possessed of dominion. The 
animal world exists for him, is for his service, and 
finds its end in him, riot in itself. Man, too, is under 
the dominion of a Superior, but his end is to become 
like him, to realize in his own person the spiritual 
excellence of God. 

(2) If rights inhere in a man, what rights has he ? 
The right to realize himself, to attain the ends of his 
being. This is, with relation to himself, his duty. 
With relation to others, it is his right. He has a 
right, therefore, to himself and to the unrestricted 
exercise of his natural powers. He cannot rightly 
be enslaved. To enslave him is to disregard this 
right and to render impossible this duty. If it 
should be said that another man or a society of men 
has a right to a man, on what ground could this right 
be defended ? On what basis would they rest their 
right ? They might, indeed, claim or possess the 
power, but they could not vindicate the right. To 
deny the right of a person to himself and to the 
exercise of all his natural powers, is to deny all right 
and to appeal to force. But this is the right of each 
man, and so of all equally. The only limitation 
arises when the activities of one interfere with the 
rights of another. It is in determining this margin 
of rights that the problem really consists. 

(3) If a man has a right to himself and to the 
exercise of his powers, he has a right to the product 
of his powers ; for otherwise he would be unable to 



CHRISTIANITY AND IABOR. 8 1 

realize his primary right. His life cannot be a mere 
passive existence. To realize his manhood, he must 
have food, tools, and, in certain climates, clothing 
and shelter. He does not find these prepared by 
nature. He has a right to produce them. His right 
is not identical with the right to a living. It is the 
right to produce a living. It entitles him to what he 
produces, but no more. If he take another man's 
food, under the pretext that " society owes him a 
living," he makes three false assumptions : First, that 
any one owes him a living ; second, that society owes 
this debt, and third, that this man, whose food he 
takes, is the representative of the society that owes 
him. The right to produce a living is not a debt 
at all. Society cannot be held to its payment. 
Worst of all, another's right to the product of his 
powers is invaded, if the food be taken. The duty 
of each man is to respect the right of every, other 
man. The duty of society is to protect each man in 
this right. The question of a right to a living is one 
dependent upon several circumstances. If there is 
food available for ten, and twenty set up this claim, 
a difficulty will arise. Supposing each of the twenty 
to have an equal claim, each can have but half what 
he needs. All may starve and no one can maintain 
his right to a living. For a man to take his living 
by force would be to rob the rest and add an injus- 
tice to a misfortune. But if ten have produced the 
food for ten, and ten others press the claim of equal 
division, what becomes of the rights of the ten who 
have produced their living ? The claim of the idle 



82 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ten is without foundation. They have no right to 
the food of the others. Even charity will be difficult 
in the case imagined, but sharing would be charity. 

(4) The question of rights is apparently complicated 
by the statement that all wealth, as it exists in soci- 
ety, is a social and not an individual product. Take 
a loaf of bread, for example. This, it is said, repre- 
sents a host of producers. Not only the baker and 
the miller and the farmer, but the agricultural imple- 
ment maker, the wood-chopper who cut the timber 
in the reaper, the iron-workers who fashioned the 
iron, the miners, the coal-diggers, the teamsters, the 
wagon-makers, the horseshoers, the harness-makers, 
and a vast cloud of other contributors whom we 
seldom think about, are all co-producers of that 
identical loaf of bread ; that is, it would not be such 
as it is if these agencies had not conspired to bring 
together the conditions of its production. They all 
have a share in it. By implication, if any one of 
them were hungry, he might help himself. But which 
one might ? We have here not only the confusion 
of rights, but the practical obliteration of them. Is 
there no one who, above all others, and in opposition 
to all others, has a right to use this bread ? The 
workman on whose table it lies paid the baker for it, 
the baker paid the miller, and the miller paid the 
farmer for the wheat there is in it. Presumably 
every co-producer has already received his share for 
his efforts in producing it. If not, and all want it, 
it is rather late in the day for the adjudication of 
claims, and the probability is there will be a free 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 83 

fight over it. But the question of right is not the 
question of division. It is prior to the question of 
division. It must be settled as the basis of any 
settlement of the question of division on the princi- 
ple of right. To fight for the bread is to ignore all 
questions of right. To ask for the equities is to 
assume that there is a moral law of division. When 
the division of claims has been made in accordance 
with its law, and each claim has been met, what 
becomes of the social property in the bread ? It 
is a mere mystification. The bread belongs wholly 
and absolutely to the man who has bought it and 
paid for it. He has discharged all claims upon it. 
Neither society nor any other man than its owner 
has a right to a crumb of it. 

(5) The mist now descends upon the question of 
rights from still another source. The loaf belongs 
to the man who has earned it by his labor, but has 
not society a claim upon it through its claim upon 
him ? Society has made him what he is. It has 
protected him, it has educated him, it has furnished 
him a chance to labor. Is there not here a social 
limitation of individual rights ? Yes, without ques- 
tion, the man is indebted for many services rendered. 
For these he ought to pay. The cost of them, so 
far as it can be ascertained, ought to be made out, 
and then with all the rest, sharing like advantages, 
he should pay his proportion of the cost. This is 
the justification of taxation. If he enjoys a state 
of society where public roads are used and public 
schools have shed light along the path, he certainly 



84 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ought to pay for all this. But when this is done 
can he eat his loaf without a mortgage upon it ? 
No, we are told, he must still share it with the poor 
and unfortunate. But he insists that he has done 
that in paying his taxes, and has already remembered 
the poor. When at last can he hope to sit down to 
an undivided loaf ? Who are these poor that are 
still unprovided for ? What is their claim ? It is 
simply the cry of the poor who are always with us, 
pleading for charity, not pressing a right. It cannot 
be formulated as a right without an abuse of lan- 
guage. It is an opportunity for works of mercy, 
which every Christian man will embrace in his own 
way, but to call it a "right," to press it as a social 
obligation that binds a man to action, is to destroy 
the very possibility of charity in the name of justice. 
(6) We conclude, then, that the laborer is at last 
owner of his bread and has a right to it which can- 
not be rationally disputed. It is in a peculiar sense 
" property." That it is private is involved in its very 
nature. It is the fruit of individual powers, put forth 
under the protection of rights. It is simply the 
extension of personality. The right of property is 
not based upon the possession of it, or upon univer- 
sal consent. The right may exist where the posses- 
sion does not, and where consent is not universal. 
The right precedes all property. It is inherent in 
man as a personal being. Deny his personality, link 
him with the lower animals, regard him as a product 
of nature, the highest note in the music of evolution, 
and there is no right of property ; but then there is 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 85 

no right whatever. There remains nothing but con- 
flicting forces, the triumph of might and the slavery 
of the laborer. If the laborer has any rights which 
he can defend by other means than dynamite, if he 
has any standing before the tribunal of reason, it is 
because he is a person, because he is that which 
Christ taught that he is, the image of God, clothed 
with the majesty of freedom. Christianity solves 
this problem of the laborer's rights in the light of 
its conception of man, the conception that has 
enfranchised the slave, emancipated woman, and 
snatched the abandoned child from the eagles and the 
wolves, to place it in the safety of the cradle and the 
sunlight of the school. 

(7) The right of private property is challenged by 
some who admit its general principle, when that 
property assumes the form of land. Henry George 
insists that the landlord is a monopolist and that all 
land is in equity the property of society ; or, as he 
puts it, "common property." He does not say, how- 
ever, to whom it belongs, nor is that possible upon 
his theory. It belongs to all who are, have been, or 
ever will be on the earth, and equally. Still, he pro- 
poses to tax all the land in the United States to the 
full extent of the annual rental, and put the money 
into the United States treasury. There can be little 
doubt that, if it ever reached that destination, it 
would be distributed, but it is doubtful if the " ring" 
would include all the alleged rightful claimants past, 
present, and to come. It would happen, however, 
that thousands of honest and industrious laborers, 



86 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

who have put their lives into the improvement of 
lands, to say nothing of thousands of helpless wid- 
ows and orphans whom the departed have left behind, 
would be rendered homeless and reduced to penury, 
while the scant three per cent, income which Ameri- 
can acres are paying, when other investments are 
worth twice that percentage, would go into the hands 
of officials whose places might be more coveted than 
the mayoralty of New York City. But if we can 
readily dismiss this preposterous proposition of one 
who, like other political agitators, lives on the sensa- 
tion he creates rather than on the labor he glorifies, 
we may have more respect for John Stuart Mill, 
when he says : " When the ' sacredness ' of property 
is talked of, it should always be remembered that any 
such sacredness does not belong in the same degree 
to landed property. It is the original inheritance of 
the whole species." 5 The idea of a right of prop- 
erty residing in a " species " is more astonishing 
than it is intelligible. As the species is indefinite, 
no individual claim can be determined. How, then, 
can it be decided whether an individual owner has 
more or less than his share ? If it is to be settled 
upon the basis of living claimants, even then it would 
be practically as indefinite. We must first ascertain 
the amount of land and the number of persons. A 
plague in Asia or the submergence of an island in 
Polynesia would seriously disturb boundaries. If 
the earth belongs to the "species," the rent of this 
continent does not belong to the United States 

6 Mill's Principles of Political Economy, book ii, chap. i. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 87 

treasury, and when collected a portion should be 
sent to Belgium, where the population is exceedingly 
crowded, and, indeed, disbursed throughout the globe, 
in the form of Christmas presents, based on the ter- 
ritorial distribution. In that case, it would pay to 
keep away from the land altogether and the taxes 
would be reduced and dividends increased by going 
to sea. Herbert Spencer goes to the root of the 
question, as a question of theory, and it is simply 
that, rather than one for practice. He says : 
" Equity does not permit property in land. For if 
one portion of the earth's surface may justly become 
the possession of an individual and may be held by 
him for his sole use and benefit as a thing to which 
he has an exclusive right, then other portions of the 
earth's surface may be so held ; and eventually the 
whole of the earth's surface ; and our planet may 
thus lapse altogether into private hands." 6 I do 
not pause to show that no land is held over which 
society does not enjoy eminent domain and the right 
of way for compensation, or that too extensive land- 
holding is practically unprofitable, or that land is 
regarded as common property in certain parts of the 
world without perceptible advantage, or that, as 
Laveleye has shown, land was originally held as 
tribal property, and private property is the only 
regime under which improvement has taken place ; 
but adhere to the purely theoretical and imaginary 
form in which the argument is stated. Herbert 
Spencer defends private property in commodities and 

6 Spencer's Social Statics, part ii, chap. ix. 



88 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

copyrights. Not being a landowner, but deriving 
his income from royalties on his books, he sees a 
great injustice in private ownership of the soil, but 
none in taxing the people for truth, or such approxi- 
mations to it as he may personally evolve. Let us 
now, in the same fanciful manner, draw a parallel to 
Spencer's argument against landowning. " Equity 
does not permit a man to own the dinner on his 
table. For, if a man may own one dinner, he may 
own another, and if two dinners, then ten, and so on, 
until he might own all the food-supply in the world, 
and our planet would be reduced to starvation." If 
this seems very absurd, Spencer's fancy is not less 
so. There is as much motive for owning all the food 
as for owning all the land ; and more, for less money 
buys a grain crop than buys a farm, and the power 
over others would be much greater if one could com- 
mand all the food than if he owned all the land. As 
a matter of fact, the food-supply, the coal-supply, and 
the oil-supply in the United States are more nearly 
in the control of a few men than the land. There 
are men in Chicago who know that the grain market 
can be controlled without owning the land. But if 
a man cannot own food, he cannot own himself. The 
argument against the ownership of land lies with 
equal weight against the owning of one's dinner ; but 
if one cannot own his dinner, he cannot own his 
body, and if not his body then not his brain, and if 
not his brain, then not the products of it ; hence 
Herbert Spencer has no equitable property in his 
copyright ! 



CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR. 89 

(8) We conclude that the laborer has the right to 
the fruit of his labor, and the whole fruit of it, after 
he has satisfied the like rights of others. This is his 
right, if there be any ethical foundation of society or 
any moral nature in man. But there is another 
aspect of this problem of the rights of the laborer. 
All that he is and all the natural agents which 
he employs are bestowments of a higher Power. 
While no man may interfere with his use of his 
powers and the fruits of his toil expended upon the 
materials and forces of nature, there is a claim that 
underlies all — the claim of the Creator. Christ 
has presented this neglected aspect of the problem 
in his parable of the talents. Behind this fortifica- 
tion of rights in which the producer of wealth in- 
trenches himself and protects himself from all inva- 
sion of rights, is that citadel of duty which gives 
security to them all. It is into this that the defender 
of his rights must at last retire when pressed by his 
enemies. He says : " I have duties to perform to 
my family, to my friends. If you take away my 
rights, I cannot perform my duties. I am bound to 
realize manhood, and my rights must be accorded 
that I may perform my duties." This is the Christian 
solution of the origin of rights. It says to the 
laborer : This is your land, for you have cleared its 
swamps and blasted out its rocks and made it golden 
with a harvest ; this is your grain, for you have dropped 
the dry seeds into the moist earth at springtime and 
have harvested and winnowed and garnered it ; this 
is your gold, for you have burrowed into the moun- 



90 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

tains for it and washed away the sand from it until it 
glitters in your hand ; but remember, there is upon 
it all a claim that you must recognize — the claim of 
Him who fashioned the mountains and hollowed out 
the valleys and buried the bright nuggets deep in the 
rocks for you to gather ; the claim of a Father who 
has placed you among brethren who are like yourself, 
equal in moral dignity to yourself, if not in powers 
or possessions, to whom also he has given rights, 
and whose burdened backs and wearied hands you 
cannot, as a man and a brother, cause to toil 
and ache to heap up your treasures or feed your 
pride. Christianity, respecting and defending every 
right of man because he is man, with one hand holds 
the shield of a protecting goddess over the rights of 
property, and with the other uplifts the sword of 
justice against the robber and the oppressor. The 
right of property is simply the right of a steward 
to discharge his trust without interference. But 
" it is required in stewards that a man be found 
faithful." 

The increase of wealth is attended with great perils, 
yet Christianity favors and aids that increase. All 
the sages and philosophers of antiquity dreaded the 
day when the simplicity of poverty should give place to 
the luxury of wealth. They had good reason for this 
fear, for no pagan nation has ever grown rich without 
the deterioration of its people. A prophetic psalm 
of ancient Israel expresses a wish which no pagan 
sage had dared to utter, but only in view of a condi- 
tion that renders riches safe. " God be merciful unto 



CHRISTIANITY AND TAB OR. 



91 



us, and bless us, and cause his face to shine upon us, 
that thy ways may be known upon the earth, thy 
saving health among all nations. . . . Then shall the 
earth yield her increase ; and God, even our own 
God, shall bless us." 



IV. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS 
OF WEALTH. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
WEALTH. 



I. THE PROBLEM OF DISTRIBUTION. 

1. The Problem an Old One. 

2. Its Contemporary Complications. 

3. The Discussion of the Problem. 

4. Christ's Refusal to be a Divider. 

5. Christianity gives the Spirit, but not the Science of a 

Solution. 

6. The Method of Arbitration. 

II. SCHEMES FOR EQUALIZING WEALTH. 

1. The Postulate of Socialism. 

2. The History and Literature of Socialism. 

3. The Equality of Men a False Assumption. 

4. The Injustice of Equalizing Wealth. 

5. The Fruits of Labor determined by Social Utility. 

6. The Specific Forms of Socialism : 

(1) Revolutionary Socialism; 

(2) Agrarian Socialism ; 

(3) State Socialism ; 

(4) Christian Socialism. 

7. Did Christ teach Human Equality? 

III. THE EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 

1. Progressive Acquisition. 

2. Decentralizing Agencies. 

3. The Case of the Proletarian. 

4. Industrial Partnerships. 

5. Labor Organizations. 

6. The World as a School of Morals. 

7. Christian Beneficence. 



IV. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
WEALTH. 



i. When wealth has been produced, there arises 
the problem of its distribution. It is not a new- 
problem, as the history of the conflicts of capital and 
labor reveals. Ever since the banquet board of life 
has been spread for men, they have been crowding 
one another for the best places. But the conditions 
are ever changing. In earlier times, large classes 
gave up all hope of a place at the table, and were 
content to eat a few crumbs in a corner. It is not 
so to-day. The results of the republican movement 
of thought are felt throughout the civilized world. 
Men everywhere feel that they are as good as others ; 
and, as a Hibernian once said, sometimes a great 
deal better ! Political equality has become so gen- 
eral that social elevation is the dream of the lowest. 
But it is by no means the intention of any to surren- 
der their places. The same strong desire for per- 
sonal superiority, as distinguished from personal 
excellence, that has always been so powerful a motive 
in men, is still active, and never more so than in our 
own land and time. In truth, the motive for eleva- 
tion is even more predominant than ever. The cause 



96 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of this lies in the almost universal presumption of 
the least fortunate people that all misfortune can be 
effaced by the possession of wealth. The rush for 
the banquet is never so prompt and energetic as 
when the crowd is hungry, and the politically enfran- 
chised bring a good appetite to the scene of wealth's 
distribution. 

2. While the problem is thus made a pressing one, 
there are several circumstances that tend to render 
it complex. One is the unprecedented division of 
labor, so minute that almost every commodity is a 
social product. When a barbarian carved a stone 
into a hatchet with his own hands, there could be no 
doubt to whom it belonged ; but when a schoolboy 
purchases a penknife, an army of co-producers rises 
behind it, each, it may be, with some unsatisfied 
claim upon it. Another source of difficulty is found 
in the vast but incalculable progress in the use of 
mechanical implements and forces, which renders it 
troublesome to ascertain how large a share of the 
world's general advancement may fall to each mem- 
ber of society. For example : There is no patent on 
the use of steam. It has become a human inheri- 
tance to which no class has an exclusive right. 
What proportion of this common advantage should 
each person enjoy ? It is said that, although there 
has been marvelous progress in the production of 
wealth, there are classes, and these the hardest 
worked of all, who have not received a perceptible 
increment of benefit from this and other heirlooms 
of humanity. The rhetorical author of "Progress 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



97 



and Poverty" does not deny the absolute improve- 
ment of workingmen in civilized countries, but he 
formulates this alleged though not clearly proved dis- 
proportion of benefit in the telling but false aphorism, 
"The rich are growing richer, and the poor, poorer." 1 
It does not mollify the aroused sense of indignation 
at this apparent injustice, to be told that many of the 
greatest fortunes have been acquired by men who 
began life as wage-earners, and that some of the 
most gigantic estates in the world have been amassed 
in one or two generations. This is, in fact, the 
greatest provocation to the envious, that a man in 
a nominally free country should rise so rapidly above 
his fellows as in a few short years to " bestride 
the narrow world like a colossus." 

3. The general diffusion of intelligence and the 
accessibility of information on every subject have 
conspired to convert the more advanced countries 
into a vast indignation meeting, where the most vig- 
orous debate on the constitution of society and the 
schemes for its reconstruction that has ever re- 
sounded in the "parliament of man" is at present 
rolling its tide of spasmodic eloquence and untrained 
logic upon the understanding and the conscience of 
this generation. The political economist has heard 
the definitions and pretended axioms of his " dismal 
science" mutilated and denounced, ridiculed and 



1 For a statistical refutation of Henry George's statement, " The rich are 
growing richer, and the poor, poorer," see Rae's Contemporary Socialism, 
chap, ix ; and Mallock's Property and Progress, essay on The Statistics of 
Agitation. 



98 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

refuted, and dismissed as impotent to govern thought 
or dictate action. The socialistic theorist has pro- 
posed the most radical and revolutionary remedies, 
and his more excited cohorts of agitators have dis- 
turbed the discussion with bomb and pistol, till it has 
been found necessary to eject them from the world 
as conspiring assassins. The Christian minister has 
preached the precepts of peace with various degrees 
of comprehension of the debate, and with alternating 
sympathies with his friends among the rich and 
among the poor, generally with the result of produc- 
ing the impression that his sentiments were good and 
his intentions commendable, but sometimes with a 
sneer that his salary was paid by the men who could 
spare the money, and with the intimation that it is 
not "peace " but "justice " that men want. 

4. If we seriously ask, Has Christianity any rela- 
tion to the problem of wealth's distribution ? we 
shall at once recall the words of Christ, when the 
young man came to him, saying, " Master, speak to 
my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me." 
And Jesus answered: " Man, who made me a judge 
or a divider over you ? " Then follows that pregnant 
passage which no theory of the distribution of wealth 
can afford to ignore. Turning to the multitude, he 
said : " Take heed, and beware of covetousness ; for 
a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the 
things which he possesseth. And he spake a para- 
ble unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich 
man brought forth plentifully ; and he thought within 
himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



99 



room where to bestow my fruits ? And he said, This 
will I do : I will pull down my barns, and build 
greater ; and there will I bestow all my fruits and 
my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou 
hast much goods laid up for many years ; take thine 
ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto 
him, Thou fool ! this night thy soul shall be required 
of thee ; then whose shall those things be which 
thou has provided ? So is he that layeth up treasure 
for himself, and is not rich toward God." What 
ground have we for thinking that if Christ were in 
the flesh to-day he would give another answer? 
What authority has any disciple of his, in his name, 
to give another ? The plain duty of Christians is to 
understand and apply this teaching. It involves : 
(i) a rebuke to covetousness ; (2) the declaration 
that true wealth does not consist in earthly posses- 
sions ; (3) the necessity of riches toward God, or 
spiritual attainment. 

5. Has Christianity, then, no relation to this sub- 
ject ? May not Christian men attempt the problem 
of distribution ? Certainly we are not assuming to 
be dividers over men when we seek to ascertain the 
principles of right division. We are producers of 
wealth, we have a share in it, and we must know how 
to divide it among ourselves. If we may draw any 
practical lesson from Christ's unwillingness to act as 
judge, it is that he had no principle to apply that 
men might not by themselves discover. He has else- 
where recommended that differences be settled by 
agreement and, if that is impossible, by calling in an 



IOO SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

arbitrator. He chose not to arbitrate in this case for 
reasons that are not, indeed, expressed, but are 
certainly implied. He referred at once to " covetous- 
ness." The brother who had the inheritance doubt- 
less had it in accordance with the law. The claimer 
may have been disinherited for his vices, may have 
possessed and wasted his share of the fortune, may 
have been utterly incapable, intellectually and mor- 
ally, of its proper management. Christ states the 
spirit with which wealth ought to be regarded. That 
is really what men need. Victor Hugo once said : 
"Social philosophy is, in essence, science and peace." 
Christianity commands that we approach this ques- 
tion in "peace," but our own faculties may discover 
the "science." 

6. Arbitration is rightly represented as the Chris- 
tian method of settling disputes over wealth. It 
possesses the advantage of pursuing the way of 
peace. But it lacks science. With the best of in- 
tentions, men may miss the mark of justice if they 
do not know on what principles to proceed. If there 
were an omnipresent paternal umpire, endowed with 
perfect wisdom and impartiality, to administer justice 
in every case, arbitration would realize perfect equity. 
But when we consider how complicated are the phe- 
nomena, how unwilling men are to expose their 
affairs to other persons, and how reluctant the dis- 
appointed one is likely to be in accepting a decision, 
and add to all this the innumerable cases in which 
the tedious process has to be applied, it is evident 
that it is not as easy as it is sometimes represented 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. IOI 

to be. Available in the larger interests of inter- 
national disputes, because of the comparative infre- 
quency of the occasions when it must be invoked, it 
is less powerful in the presence of the personal dis- 
tribution of property. And yet, it is not only the 
best means we have, but has proved exceedingly use- 
ful in France and England, where it has been for 
years the favorite method of deciding differences 
between workmen and their employers. The history 
of arbitration in trade often reads like a romance, 
and is a perfect vindication of the wisdom of pacific 
adjustments. On the dark background of waste 
and violence occasioned by strikes, it shines out like 
a fiery cross in the heavens, the symbol of blended 
sacrifice and justice. But even for peaceful arbitra- 
tion, we need general principles. Once discovered, 
they may be recognized by all as furnishing the basis 
of voluntary agreement ; or, if not left to personal 
choice, they may be incorporated into the law of the 
land, which is the generalized agreement of a people 
as to what is right and just. 



II. 

i. Aristotle, who in many respects has not been 
surpassed as a political writer, says : " Everywhere 
inequality is a cause of revolution." He then adds: 
"Men agree about justice in the abstract, but they 
differ about proportion ; some think that if they are 
equal in any respect they are equal absolutely ; 
others that if they are unequal in any respect, they 



102 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

are unequal in all." 2 If he had written to-day, after 
reading the current doctrines of socialism, the Stagi- 
rite could not have expressed himself more wisely. 
Men believe themselves equal in all but wealth, but 
feel keenly their inequality in the possession of it. 
They thence conclude that they ought to be equal 
in wealth also, and every socialistic theory proceeds 
upon this assumption. In the undiscriminating 
mind, political equality involves social equality. 
Men who are not equal in fact imagine that they 
are by right. Socialism, however it is judged in 
the light of its proposals, must at least be credited 
with an ethical impulse. It is a dream of impossible 
remedies for imaginary wrongs. It assumes that 
all wealth is produced by the labor of society, 
that it is, therefore, the property of society, and 
that justice can be realized only by dividing equally 
that which belongs to all. It does not pause to 
reflect that the units in society have not equally 
produced wealth, and that the claim of each is pro- 
portional to his productive contribution. It perceives 
in the actual condition of men a separation of wealth 
from its alleged producers, a partition of products 
by which capital, the creation of labor, is placed on 
one side of a line and labor, empty-handed, on the 
other ; while existing law creates an impassable 
barrier between them, excluding the laborer from 
the fruits of his labors and obliterating every right 
by the legalized institution of wrong. It proposes 
by various means to break through this barrier and 
to divide this wealth among all men. 

* Aristotle's Politics, book v, i. 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



I03 



2. This is socialism in its generic outline. It has, 
however, assumed chameleon forms and wears as 
many masks as Proteus himself. Its history has 
been so often repeated in the numerous popular 
books called out by the contemporary demand, like 
those of Woolsey, Rae, Laveleye, and Ely, to men- 
tion only a few, that any outline even of its historic 
development through the writings of its forerunners, 
the Communists, Babceuf, Cabet, Saint-Simon, 
Fourier, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and Owen, and its 
own doctrinaires, Rodbertus, Karl Marx, Lasalle, 
and their followers, would be a work of supereroga- 
tion. All these doctrines' have been lately stated, 
expounded, and criticized by numerous able writers, 
among them a number of distinguished clergymen, 
such as Doctors Brown, Behrends, Lorimer, Gladden, 
Smyth, Newton, and others, who have discussed the 
bearings of these theories both upon the social order 
and the ethical life. A brief summary and examina- 
tion of socialistic doctrines, therefore, in the pres- 
ence of so much available literature, is all that is to 
be attempted before we proceed to the wider rela- 
tions which our plan contemplates. 

3. The primary assumption of socialism, often 
latent rather than expressed, is that men are equal. 
It is a false assumption. They are not equal in 
powers, either physical or mental, in skill, or in 
industry. They are, therefore, unequal in produc- 
tion. Some produce only a bare subsistence, and 
a few not even this. Others create a considerable 
surplus. Improgressive labor consumes the whole 



104 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of its product, while progressive labor accumulates 
an excess. 3 The producers of wealth are also un- 
equal in their needs. Science certainly contributes 
to the creation of wealth, but the man of science 
cannot live as the day-laborer lives. He must be 
sustained during a long period of preparation, must 
be supplied with books and appliances, and must 
enjoy opportunities of travel. The chemist and the 
coal-heaver are both laborers, but under unequal 
conditions of necessary expense and surroundings. 
Men are unequal also in their achievements, even 
when they have expended the same amount of 
energy. More depends upon the judicious direction 
of power than upon its quantity. It is impossible 
to measure value by days of labor. One man will 
do in one day what another will not do so well in 
two or, possibly, cannot do at all. Such a standard 
is as absurd as an elastic yardstick. No a priori 
mathematical conception of equality can solve the 
problem of distribution. The units are unequal and 
the laws of the equation are, therefore, not applica- 
ble. The prime error of socialism consists in im- 
porting this mathematical idea of an equation into 
a province of variable units. 

4. If each laborer has a right to the whole fruits 
of his labor, which we have demonstrated in discuss- 
ing the problem of the laborer's rights, equal par- 
ticipation in wealth involves the moral paradox of 

» It may be well for the reader to recur to the distinction between impro- 
gressive and progressive labor, as given in Lecture III, p. 69, if this distinc- 
tion is not clearly understood, 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



I05 



taking from one who has a greater right and bestow- 
ing upon one who has a less right. Equality in 
distribution is, therefore, a repudiation of the ethical 
idea. It cannot be justified on a basis of right. 
Equality is not equity, if the units who are to partici- 
pate are unequal. " From each according to his 
powers, to each according to his needs," is Louis 
Blanc's monstrous axiom of distribution. It is but a 
euphemism for the spoliation of the able and indus- 
trious for the benefit of the weak and idle. When 
rendered compulsory, as socialism proposes, it is a 
new form of slavery. That it is an inversion of the 
old slavery which subjected the weaker to the 
stronger, does not render it more acceptable. It 
proposes to enslave the few who are strong by the 
combined action of the weak. The pigmies may 
shackle the giant, but first they must put out his 
eyes. Like another Samson, he would at last end his 
bondage in wreck and ruin. The individual cannot 
be thus deprived of freedom, but if he were, the ser- 
vile spirit would inevitably survive when hope was 
dead, and weakness and idleness would be preferred 
to strength and industry. The grand motive in the 
creation of wealth is the expectation of its enjoy- 
ment. The adoption of Louis Blanc's aphorism, or 
any compulsory equivalent, would paralyze labor and 
introduce an epoch of industrial stagnation and 
pauperism. 

5. The value of a day's labor depends upon its 
relation to social need. Social -utility is the quality 
in labor that responds to that need and affords it 



106 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

satisfaction. It may require as much force to pro- 
duce a thousand coats that will not fit as to produce 
the same number of well-fitting garments, or to pro- 
duce them out of season as in the season when they 
are needed. But there is obviously a great difference 
with reference to social need. The well-cut gar- 
ments will all be sold at a good price, while the 
others must be sold for less, or remain unsold. A 
man with a pile of clothes too small for him is hardly 
better off than a man without any. The socialists 
overlook this element of quality in labor. Karl 
Marx argues that all capital is produced by labor and 
then that the laborers are all and equally entitled to 
share in its possession. But suppose the tailors take 
for their share the coats they have produced. Some, 
though they have worked as hard as any, will be 
rewarded with the ill-fitting garments which are of 
no use to them, and they are as badly off as if they 
had received less wages in money than their more 
skilful fellows. It is evidently unjust to take away 
from the expert in order to reward the bunglers. It 
is equally so to rob the successful for the benefit of 
the unsuccessful. The whole problem of just distri- 
bution turns upon the pivot of social utility in 
response to social need. " Why should the stone- 
breaker on a railroad receive less money for his time 
than the engineer of a train, and the engineer less 
than the president of the company ? It is not 
because it costs more effort to preside over the 
affairs of the company ; it is not because it costs 
more effort to run the train. So far as the putting 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



IO7 



forth of measurable energy goes, the order of 
rewards ought to be reversed, for the stone-breaker 
puts forth more foot-pounds of force than the other 
two. It is not a complete answer to say that the 
cost of preparation is the measure of reward and 
that the engineer must be paid for the time used in 
learning to manage the engine, and the president for 
the time spent in learning to preside over a rail- 
road's affairs. The true answer is this : the service 
of each man is paid according to its worth to the 
company. If the stone-breaker will not work, others 
will take his place for what he receives. If the 
engineer will not work, others will take his place for 
what he receives. Wages must always rise to this 
market-price. But the engineer will not work for 
what the stone-breaker receives. Why not ? Because 
he can get more for his service. Why can he get 
more ? Because others are willing to pay more. 
Why are they willing to pay more ? Because his 
service has a higher quality than that of the other 
man. In what does this quality consist ? In ele- 
ments of knowledge, skill, and judgment, in power to 
do safely and certainly what the other cannot do 
safely and certainly. Put the stone-breaker in charge 
of the engine and there would be a destructive acci- 
dent. Put the engineer in charge of the president's 
business and there would be unskilful management 
of the company's affairs, involving loss and possible 
bankruptcy. It may be settled as certain that the 
company would not pay the engineer any more than 
the stone-breaker, if it could hire him for the same. 



108 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Service has social utility in proportion as it rises in 
the scale of skill and efficiency. The stone-breaker 
is little more than a machine, so far as his occupation 
goes. A machine has been invented to take his 
place. As power advances from the merely physical 
to the intellectual and moral orders, it becomes more 
valuable." 4 

6. The specific forms of socialism all share, to 
some extent, in the generic fallacy of the doctrine. 
They all propose by artificial means to unite suddenly 
capital and labor in the same hands. 

(i) Revolutionary socialism, as represented by the 
International Workmen's Association, aims to do 
this by universal confiscation and redistribution of 
wealth. The political socialists of this school would 
accomplish their end by the votes of the people, but 
this method is usually seen to be impracticable, 
since it implies as its precondition a mental revolu- 
tion that argument cannot produce. The anarchic 
branch of this school proposes the overthrow of the 
present order by physical force and intimidation. Its 
only argument is dynamite. This is a phase of the 
question with which policemen and magistrates alone 
can deal. 

(2) Agrarian socialism sees a solution of the prob- 
lem in the confiscation and nationalization of land, 
not by purchase, but by legal compulsion through 
insufferable taxation. This is the prescription of 
Henry George for the ills of society. It is needless 

4 Quoted from my brochure on The Principles and Fallacies of Socialism, 
No. 533 of Lovell's Library. 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



IO9 



to dwell upon the injustice of this crude remedy; 
but, if applied, would it better any one's condition ? 
If the form of change were simply that present hold- 
ers of land should pay the whole rent for taxes, they 
would, in subletting, double the rent, which would 
increase the price of bread, since rent enters into 
the price of the products of land, so that non-land- 
holders would have both increased rent and increased 
cost of food, while the money thus raised would go 
in part to public improvements and in part to govern- 
ment officials. If the change involved the actual 
expulsion of landholders from their estates, it would 
provoke a war for the hearthstone that could not be 
suppressed. This agrarian socialism of George has 
all the ethical faults of revolutionary socialism with 
the additional trait of logical absurdity. As another 
has said : " He would not tax a palace, but the plot 
under it. He would not tax a line of steamships, 
but their wharf. He would not tax a lump of gold, 
but the hole in the ground out of which it was 
dug." 5 

(3) State socialism is a more subtle but equally 
inadequate solution. It proposes to solve the prob- 
lem of distribution by adding two new functions to 
the State : the reparative, undertaking to repair the 
evils of too great private possessions, by fixing a max- 
imum beyond which one may not own property and by 
wholly or partly abolishing the right of inheritance ; 
and the assistive, awarding grants to workmen for 
employment, insurance, and industrial enterprise. 

Man's Birthright, by E. H. G. Clark, introduction. 



IIO SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

This system has numerous adherents in Germany, 
among them the great chancellor, Prince Bismarck, 
and many university professors known as " Socialists 
of the Chair." 6 Some American students of polit- 
ical and social science in Germany have imported 
some of these neo-economic notions into our own 
country, and have given them a certain popularity 
through newspapers, magazines, and reviews. The 
so-called "historic" method, which characterizes 
the new school, is excellent in teaching us what to 
avoid, but easily imparts to the mind a retrogressive 
tendency. The worst vice of these economic critics, 
however, is an erudite vagueness which, in attempt- 
ing to attain to the unknown, renders very nebulous 
the whole province of the known. They write 
rhetorically about the ethical element in economic 
theory, without pointing out with clearness the 
basis of right, or showing precisely how rights may 
be realized. Social theories that have no better 
title to acceptance than flings at the immorality of 
the classic economists present a very poor prima 
facie case. Mackintosh says : " I have known Adam 
Smith slightly, Ricardo well, Malthus intimately. 
Is it not something to say for a science, that its 
three great masters were about the three best men 
I ever knew ? " "' It is sometimes forgotten that 

6 Notably Professor Adolph Wagner, of the University of Berlin, who has 
formulated a " law of increasing extension of the functions of public power " 
(Grundlegung, p. 308) , and would both limit inheritance and enforce state 
insurance for workingmen. 

7 Quoted by Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman, in Science Economic Dis- 
cussion, p. 14. 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. I I I 

the founder of that much-reproached science which 
assumes that self-interest is the principal factor in 
the world of wealth, was also the author of an eth- 
ical system founded wholly upon sympathy, and 
bearing for its motto, "Put yourself in his place." 
The neologists condemn the wage-system, or system 
of free personal contract between employer and 
employed, as utterly unworthy of our civilization. 
But they offer nothing better. There are vague 
allusions to the "extension of state action," but 
no precise methods are pointed out by which the 
State may control the distribution of wealth, with- 
out the invasion of personal rights which we Amer- 
icans are accustomed to hold dear. It may be 
modestly questioned if these writers have not im- 
ported a temporary phase of German speculation, 
conceived largely under the influence of a govern- 
ment that desires to ingratiate itself into the affec- 
tions of the people by the performance of paternal 
functions, in order to render permanent an empire 
but newly created. 8 This new doctrine of the 

8 In a speech delivered on the third of January, 1882, Bismarck said : " I 
have already explained the system which I am come to uphold, according 
to the instructions of His Majesty the Emperor. We wish to establish a 
state of things in which no one can say ' I exist only to bear social burdens, 
and nobody takes thought of my fate.' Our dynasty has for a long time been 
endeavoring to reach this object. Frederick the Great already describes this 
mission in saying, ' I am king of the beggars,' and he realized it in adminis- 
tering strict justice. Frederick William III gave freedom to the peasants. 
Our present sovereign is animated by the noble ambition to put a hand, in 
his old age, to the work of assuring to the least favored and weakest of our 
fellow-citizens, if not the same rights that were seventy years ago granted to 
the peasantry, at least a decided amelioration in their condiiion, in order 
that they can count upon the help of the State." " The whole theory of 
state socialism, and of a socialist monarch, is summed up in this passage," 
says Laveleye, from whom I quote it. The Socialism of To-day, chap. vi. 



112 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

growing dominance of the State, and diminution of 
the individual, will be found as repugnant to Amer- 
ican independence as the lofty German theories of 
transcendentalism, not less ably or enthusiastically 
urged upon the American mind a generation ago, 
proved to our Yankee common-sense. For scholarly 
young gentlemen, whose reputations are yet in the 
nascent condition, and whose chosen department of 
study does not afford the brilliant discoveries of 
physical science, the introduction of novelties seems 
a natural policy, and " Omne ignotum pro magnifico," 
an excellent motto ; but it will require diligence, if 
in their remaining years, they convince the Amer- 
ican people that it is either sensible or just to say 
that a man may possess ninety-nine thousand, nine 
hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine 
cents, but not one hundred thousand dollars ; that 
it is a higher form of justice to give the whole or 
a part of a child's patrimony to the public than to 
the child for love of whom its father laboriously 
earned and prudently saved it ; that it is a national 
good to employ workmen with money from the 
public treasury in order to give them employment, 
under the management of public officials whose 
morals might not be better than those of some 
customs officers, or to insure men's lives, or to start 
workmen in cooperative industry. In France, in 
1848, Louis Blanc's idea of state subsidies for co- 
operation among workmen were so far carried into 
effect that " thirty associations, twenty-seven of 
which were composed of workmen, . . . received 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



113 



eight hundred and ninety thousand, five hundred 
francs. Within six months three of the Parisian 
societies failed ; and of the four hundred and thirty- 
four associates, seventy-four resigned, fifteen were 
excluded, and there were eleven changes of man- 
agers. In July, 1851, eighteen associations had 
ceased to exist. One year later twelve others had 
vanished. In 1865, four were still extant, and had 
been more or less successful. In 1875, there was 
but a single one left." 9 Such are the historic les- 
sons of state intervention for the just distribution 
of wealth. It is more likely to facilitate distribution 
than to secure justice. 

4. It is claimed by the Christian socialists that 
what the law cannot do in that it is weak, the spirit 
of Christianity can do in that it is strong. They 
would equalize wealth by religious beneficence, 
voluntarily raising and depositing in the hands of 
workingmen large sums of money for cooperative 
industry. Forty years ago the communist Villegar- 
delle compiled a volume of extracts from the Christian 
Fathers, to show that social property is the Chris- 
tian ideal. Bishop Ketteler, of Mayence, was a 
friend of Lasalle and wrote a book in 1864 on "The 
Labor Question and Christianity," depicting modern 
society as the revolutionary socialists do, acknowledg- 
ing all the evils of which they complain. Upon this 
basis he offered an eloquent plea for voluntary con- 
tributions from all good Catholics for socialistic 
experiments. A host of others have followed in his 

9 Laveleye, op. cit. p. 73, note. 



ii 4 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



train, until there is now in Germany a strong contin- 
gent of Catholic socialists, strangely enough united 
politically with the atheistic socialists to forward the 
schemes of industrial revolution. Quickened to 
action by the apparent success of the Catholics in 
leading the minds of workingmen, and fearful of 
losing all hold on that class through lack of sympathy 
with its misfortunes, the evangelical Christians of 
Germany, headed by Dr. Stocker, the eloquent court 
preacher at Berlin, have also organized a socialistic 
movement. 10 Herr Todt places the following epi- 
graph at the head of his book on " Radical German 
Socialism and Christianity " : " Whoever would under- 
stand the social question and contribute to its solution 
must have on his right hand the works on political 
economy and on his left the literature of scientific 
socialism, and must keep the New Testament open 
before him." " Political economy explains the social 
anatomy, scientific socialism describes the disease, 
and the gospel indicates the cure." But the masses 
who are inclined to socialistic ideas quite generally 
repudiate the " socialists in surplice " and prefer 
the " socialists in blouse." The movement has made 
more converts to socialism among Christians than it 
has converts to Christianity among socialists. Said 
Herr Most at a joint meeting at which Dr. Stocker 
was present : " The social democracy will not re- 
cede ; it will pursue its course and accomplish its 

10 The views of Dr. Stocker are set forth in his address on " Die Bibel und 
die Sociale Frage," delivered before the Evangelical Labor Union at Niirn- 
berg, which has passed through many editions, 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



115 



designs, even though all priestdom should rise 
against it, like a cloud of locusts thick enough to 
darken the sun. The social democracy knows that 
the days of Christianity are numbered, and that the 
time is not far distant when we shall say to the 
priests, Settle your account with heaven, for your 
hour has come." n It is clear that oil and water 
are not more repugnant to coalescence than are 
Christianity and socialism, considered as types of 
thought and feeling. Maurice and Kingsley are well 
known as advocates of what has been called Christian 
socialism in England, but their doctrines are wholly 
different from those of the German socialists. 12 
" Competition," said Maurice, " is put forth as a law 
of the universe. That is a lie. The time has come 
for us to declare that it is a lie by word and deed. I 
see no way but associating for work instead of for 
strikes." "It is my belief," said Kingsley, "that 
not self-interest, but self-sacrifice, is the only law 
upon which human society can be grounded with any 
hope of prosperity and permanence." These are 
appeals for order and renunciation rather than for 
revolution and reprisal. 

7. But it is now time to ask seriously, Did Christ 
teach the equality of men or favor the equalization 
of possessions ? When the ambitious mother of 
Zebedee's children came to him, saying, "Grant 



11 Quoted by Laveleye, op. cit. chap. vii. 

12 Some account of Christian Socialism in England is given by Laveleye, 
op. cit., supplementary chapter; and by Ely, in his French and German 
Socialism in Modern Times, chap. xiv. 



I I 6 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right 
hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom," 
Jesus replied that she knew not what she asked, and 
disclosed to her the conditions on which this pre- 
eminence depends. " To sit on my right hand and 
on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given 
to them for whom it is prepared of my Father." 
Inequality and preeminence are not denied, even in 
the kingdom of heaven, but preeminence is not an 
arbitrary gift ; it is prepared for the deserving in the 
divine order. Jesus goes on to explain that among 
the nations preeminence is based upon dominion, or 
lordship, but in the kingdom of heaven, on service. 
" Whosoever will be great among you, let him be 
your minister ; and whosoever will be chief among 
you, let him be your servant." Economic greatness 
is founded upon power, moral greatness is founded 
upon love. Inequality was recognized in both and 
not condemned in either. Whatever the opinions of 
the fathers may be, Christ does not commend equality 
in the distribution of wealth. If it be asserted that 
equality is taught in the brotherhood of man, it is 
sufficient to note that brothers, equal in nature, are 
not equal in personal powers, personal productive- 
ness, or personal deserts. In the case where Christ 
was appealed to as judge between brothers, he 
showed no concern that they be regarded as possess- 
ing equal claims, probably because he thought that 
in equity they were unequal. 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. HJ 



III. 

1. The equitable division of wealth, which cannot 
be realized by artificial aids to equality, may never- 
theless be attained by other means. I say the 
" equitable" division, not the "equal" division. This 
proceeds on the assumption that capital should be 
placed in the hands of labor only by progressive 
acquisition. It is nature's universal method, the 
method of growth, illustrated in every province of 
being, from the formation of a crystal to the consoli- 
dation of a character. Suddenly acquired wealth 
seldom remains long in its possessor's hands, or finds 
its place there even briefly without demoralizing 
results. The creation of wealth is in its nature a 
moral discipline, involving industry, patience, tem- 
perance, and self-sacrifice. Wealth, like preeminence 
in the moral world, offers its reward normally only to 
those who have been prepared in the divine order to 
receive it. Without its virtues, it may, indeed, be 
dishonestly acquired, but it cannot be permanently 
retained. 

2. The mechanism of distribution is much more 
perfect than we are wont to fancy. The wealth 
which one generation accumulates, the next scatters. 
Close observers hold that it is unusual for business 
success to remain in the same family for more than 
three generations. Within the same generation the 
centrifugal forces are acting. We see the successes 
of men, but they conceal their failures. In 1881, 
Dun & Co., the well-known commercial asrents, re- 



Il8 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ported that fifty per cent, of the wholesale merchants 
doing business in Chicago in 1870 had failed in that 
single decade. One well acquainted with such affairs 
says that not more than three per cent, of those who 
embark in trade end life with success. But, from 
the nature of it, wealth can be enjoyed only by being 
distributed. The owner of a vaultful of gold has no 
wealth in any true sense, until he unlocks the vault 
and disburses the gold. He cannot gratify the 
first desire without contributing to the social need. 
If he wishes interest, he must place his dollars in 
the hands of one who needs them and can use them. 
If he would enjoy a dinner, obtain a carriage, or build 
a mansion, he must put his coins in the hands of 
cooks, wheelwrights, or architects, who in turn pass 
them on to others. There is no wealth that does 
not respond to social need. My lord the Duke of 
Westminster, with his millions of acres and scores 
of palaces, cannot have his dinner to-day, except on 
condition that the cook and the butler have theirs 
also. 

3. But what shall we say of the man who has no 
means of satisfying social need ? There is no such 
man, unless he is an idiot, a lunatic, an invalid, or 
the victim of some misfortune. He then becomes 
an object of charity, and his case we shall consider 
later. But the so-called "proletarian" can supply 
social need. Men are too valuable to be allowed to 
starve in an industrial age. As Count Tolstoi' has 
said, " Laborers are necessary. And those who 
profit by labor will always be careful to provide the 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 



II 9 



means of labor for those who are willing to work." 13 
Why should a man who can do nothing for himself 
complain if he lives upon the lowest plane ? If he 
can do better, let him do so freely. If he is not 
above the status of the Pilgrim Fathers, let him take 
up some unimproved land and raise a crop of wheat. 
If he can, let him learn a trade and rise in it. It is 
the old way, but it is the only honest, manly way. 
If, as Haeckel says, the development of the individual 
man is a summary and epitome of the development of 
the race, let him begin where Adam did, among the 
fruit-trees, and work his way up. Away with the sen- 
timentalism and snobbishness of socialism and of 
semi-socialism, which scoff at the dignity of labor 
and ridicule the hands of toil. We are not better 
than our fathers. The proletarian of to-day may be 
the President of to-morrow, as several of our ablest 
have been. The true American does not want an 
equality which he has not earned. He wants to be 
a man, free to labor where and how he chooses, with 
liberty of contract and wages proportioned to his 
usefulness as estimated by his fellows, and through 
manhood to become the equal of any in the life of 
freedom and self-conscious nobility. 

4. No doubt much may be hoped for from indus- 
trial partnership and cooperation. There is not a 
village in the land where there are not men who have 
risen from poverty to independence by this method. 
But no enterprise will succeed where there is not 
ability to plan and manage. It ought not to succeed 

13 Count Tolstoi's My Religion, chap. x. 



120 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

without it. It would be putting a premium on stu- 
pidity and inefficiency. It is such ability that finds 
large rewards as wages of superintendence. If 
cooperating laborers can supply this among them- 
selves, or pay for it, they can have it ; but if not, 
they will fail. Whatever may be said in abuse of 
the wage-system, it shows the superiority of brains 
to muscle. Voluntary profit-sharing on the part of 
employers may be judicious, experience must decide 
this ; but profit-sharing cannot be logically disassoci- 
ated from loss-sharing, which in the end might leave 
small advantage to employees. The practicability of 
this system has been ably advocated by Sedley Tay- 
lor in his interesting little book on " Profit-sharing," 
but it implies a noble altruism not attributed to the 
" economic man." In spite of his enthusiasm as an 
advocate of this plan, that writer closes his preface 
with the " profound conviction that the methods de- 
scribed in this volume, valuable as they are in them- 
selves, constitute no panacea ; and that their best 
fruits can be reaped only by men who feel that life 
does not consist in abundance of material posses- 
sions, who regard stewardship as nobler than owner- 
ship, who see in the ultimate outcome of all true 
work issues reaching beyond the limits of the present 
dispensation, and who act faithfully and strenuously 
on these beliefs." 14 Enforced profit-sharing, like en- 
forced arbitration, is a pure chimera. It is essentially 
socialistic, invading the right of contract, and will 
never be tolerated by a free people. Here, as every- 

14 Sedley Taylor's Profit-sharing between Capital and Labor, preface. 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 12 I 

where in the discharge of the social functions, Chris- 
tianity alone can solve the problem. If all men were 
Christians, the labor problem would melt away and 
be forgotten in the sense of universal brotherhood. 
Until they are, there is no cure for the evils born of 
human greed. 

5. The organization of labor may legitimately 
accomplish much, especially in mutual help and in- 
surance. So far as labor organizations aim at 
creating fraternal feelings among workingmen, the 
improvement of the trades, the discovery of needs, 
and the distribution of men where they are wanted, 
they are highly commendable and may prove useful. 
But as human nature is constituted, they threaten to 
become the most oppressive monopolies in the land, 
binding the wills and consciences of men, forcing 
upon them actions contrary to their judgments and 
their interests ; as when, in the strikes among the 
coal-heavers in New York, men receiving $20 per 
week, promptly and satisfactorily paid, were forced 
by their executive committee into the ridiculous posi- 
tion, in order to give moral support, of striking for 
thirty-three per cent, less than they were receiving ! 
Such centralized corporations, often under the con- 
trol of petty tyrants who are without reason or con- 
science, veritable dictators without responsibilities, 
constitute an imperium in imperio, whose power and 
passion may well be dreaded. 

6. The Christian conception of man and the world 
does not afford any specific criterion for the division 
of wealth. Man is endowed with moral freedom and 



122 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANLTY. 

the world is a scene of moral discipline. It is an 
order in which hope and fear, gain and loss, success 
and failure, must ever be possible, for they are essen- 
tial to its purpose. Christ's prayer for his disciples 
was not that they might be taken out of the world, 
or that the world might be transformed to give them 
peace or comfort, but that they might be kept from 
the evil. It is not what we have, but what we are, 
that makes life sweet and blessed. Wealth is not 
simply to gratify but to unfold our natures. Its 
ministry of sensations passes away, but its ministry 
of discipline is everlasting. "The true secret of 
happiness," says Canon Westcott, " is not to escape 
toil and affliction, but to meet them with the faith 
that through them the destiny of man is fulfilled, 
that through them we can even now reflect the image 
of our Lord and be transformed into his likeness." 

7. "The poor," said Jesus, "always ye have with 
you." I cannot see that it will ever be otherwise. 
It is proof that Christ entertained no dream of social 
equality. If all were equalized to-day, there would 
be the poor, if not the rich, to-morrow. The virtue 
of beneficence will never be outgrown upon the 
earth. The incapable, the unfortunate, the sick, to 
say nothing of the idle and the improvident, will ever 
sit by the wayside, waiting for the coming of the 
Good Samaritan. For the Christian, the problem of 
wealth's distribution is largely one of judicious benefi- 
cence, for the world has learned that there is 
beneficence that is injudicious and even injurious. 
An undiscriminating charity has fostered mendicancy 



CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. I 23 

and pauperism and there are countries of Europe 
where no church is without its waiting beggar. 
William Law, the author of the " Serious Call," gave 
a literal interpretation to the words of Christ, " Give 
to him that asketh thee," and with two rich friends 
resolved to deny himself as much as possible and 
supply the needs of every applicant. They attracted 
a great crowd of idle and lying mendicants to the 
neighborhood, till finally the community had to peti- 
tion the magistrates to interfere, in order to pre- 
vent the utter demoralization of the parish. But 
suppose we should interpret with similar literalness 
the saying, " If any man come to me and hate not 
his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and 
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he 
cannot be my disciple ! " A slow beast needs sharp 
goads, and Christ stirs and startles the conscience by 
such awakening words, not as giving laws of action 
but spurs to reflection. Some counselors, like Her- 
bert Spencer, advise us to follow our own self-interest, 
without concern for others, with the assurance that 
all will thus be happier, because more independent. 
Between the misdirected almsgiving of the purely 
sympathetic and the indifference of the selfish, lies 
the narrow way of wisdom, walking in which, Christ 
says, "Whenever ye will ye may do them good." 
We are sometimes told that we ought never to give 
directly, but only through organizations. This coun- 
sel overlooks the blessing of personal ministration. 
The Good Samaritan took a personal pleasure in 
relieving misfortune. We need the contact with suf- 



124 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

fering and the lessons of patience and faith which it 
often teaches. Besides, it is sometimes the gift of 
ourselves, rather than of our money, it is our coun- 
sel, our sympathy, our word of cheer, that would 
make glad the heart and infuse strength. I have no 
word of criticism for the noble work of organized 
charity, but there is much that it cannot do, because 
it lacks the human personality which in God's order, 
both for the recipient and the bestower, should be 
present in every ministration. And, as a rule, the 
best gift is the one that has most of personality in it. 
All true strength radiates outward from the centre. 
A weak heart or a weak mind needs a strong one. 
Encouragement, advice, knowledge, a place to work 
in, a nobler work to do, are better gifts than food 
and clothing ; for they produce these and confer the 
power that continues to produce them. The best 
form of beneficence that the world has discovered is 
helping others to help themselves. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS 
OF MARRIAGE. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
MARRIAGE. 



I. THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION. 

1. Immigration from the Cradle. 

2. The Doctrine of Malthus. 

3. The Results of Malthusianism. 

4. The Inadequacy of Malthusianism. 

II. THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY. 

1. The Four Stages of Domestic Evolution. 

2. Monogamy, an alleged Transition. 

3. Socialism and the Family. 

4. Criticism of the Evolution Theory. 

III. THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF THE FAMILY. 

1 . Christ's Doctrine of Monogamy. 

2. The Divine Plan in the Family. 

3. The Family as part of the Moral Order. 

4. The Consistency of New Testament Teaching. 

IV. THE DOMESTIC STATUS. 

1. The Status of the Child. 

2. The Status of the Wife. 

3. The " Emancipation " of Woman. 

4. The Dissolution of Marriage. 






V. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
MARRIAGE. 

I. 

i. "We occupy an island," says Laveleye, in his 
work on "Primitive Property," "where we live on 
the fruits of our labor ; a shipwrecked man is thrown 
up by the sea : What is his right ? Can he say, 
invoking the unanimous opinion of jurisconsults: 
You have occupied the land by virtue of your title 
as human beings, because property is the condition 
of liberty and culture, a necessity of existence, a 
natural right ; but I also am a man, I also have a 
natural right to make a living; I can, then, occupy 
with the same title with yourselves a corner of this 
ground, in order to live here by my labor?" 1 This 
parable is illustrated whenever a human child arrives 
in the world, with the addition that the child not only 
will presently want his corner of the earth in which 
to make a living, but immediately needs to be cared 
for and then to be reared to maturity before he can 
begin his self-support by labor. Shall we give him a 
place, or shall we push him back into the sea? 
Humanity says that he must be snatched from the 
waves, even at the cost of toil and risk of life. But 

1 Laveleye, De la Propriete et de ses Formes Primitives, p. 393. 



128 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

here is another mouth to feed and a new subdivision 
of wealth is inevitable. Evidently, we have before 
us a social fact that gives rise to important problems. 
Society has an interest in the growth of population, 
and, therefore, in the conditions and forms of 
marriage. 

2. The relation of population to subsistence is 
regarded by Malthus as the central point of all 
social problems. 2 In this opinion most of the ortho- 
dox economists of England substantially concur. 
The doctrine of Malthus is, that population tends to 
increase in a geometrical ratio, while the food-supply 
tends to increase in an arithmetical ratio. In plainer 
terms, while in four generations of men population 
tends to repeat itself sixteen times, the food-supply 
tends to repeat itself only four times. The critics 
who have attempted to answer Malthus's great and 
epoch-making " Essay on the Principle of Popula- 
tion " have often done that worthy clergyman the 
grossest injustice, condemning his doctrine as essen- 
tially "immoral" and "infamous," without appre- 
hending his pure and philanthropic motives ; and 
pronouncing his principle " false," without even 
understanding it. Malthus nowhere says that popu- 
lation and food-supply do actually increase and vary 
in these ratios, but that they tend to do so. All evi- 
dence that they do not so vary which ignores the 
tendency, and appeals only to the actual state of the 
case, simply misses the mark. His book is largely 
occupied in showing why they do not thus vary in 

2 Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



I29 



reality, and the reasons are the presence in human 
history of war, pestilence, and other depopulating 
causes. These, it is to be hoped, will in time be 
abolished. What, then, is to prevent the tendency 
from realizing itself in fact, by a growth of popula- 
tion out of proportion to the growth of food-supply ? 
Malthus answers : " Preventive checks, such as 
abstention from marriage and temperance in mar- 
riage." His remedy for poverty is "prudential 
restraint" in augmenting the race. If there are not 
too many mouths to feed, there will be bread enough 
for all. Such a doctrine is not to be silenced with 
abuse, for it is evidently based on laws of nature and 
principles of logic. 

3. The Malthusian remedy for poverty and distress 
is, then, the limitation of marriages, first by public 
opinion and then by law. Let us examine the foun- 
dations upon which the theory rests as an exposition 
of the cause and cure of poverty. Overpopulation, 
if it existed anywhere, would certainly cause poverty. 
There are, no doubt, countries that are too populous 
for the general good ; that they are, is evident from 
the relief that follows emigration ; and yet, no 
doubt, even more relief might result from better 
forms of land-tenure and industrial life. The objec- 
tion offered to Malthusianism by Henry George, 3 
that the greater the number of producers the greater 
will be the wealth produced, does not meet the case ; 
for it disregards the law of diminishing returns in 
the cultivation of the soil, which must somewhere be 

3 George's Progress and Poverty, chap. iv. 



130 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



reached by the growth of population. That it has 
been nowhere reached is irrelevant to the question. 
It is absurd to say that there cannot be too many 
people to the acre. Nor does the answer of Herbert 
Spencer, 4 that such pressure of population would 
result in the elimination of the weak and feeble, and 
thus improve the race, constitute an answer to Mal- 
thus. Even though this struggle for existence should 
result in the survival of the fittest, there is no assur- 
ance that all might not be deteriorated by the hard- 
ships of the competition, as all are in Tierra del 
Fuego. The just and true criticism upon Malthusi- 
anism relates both to its assumptions and its reme- 
dies. That theory assumes that the reproductive 
power will continue to act in geometrical ratio; 
whereas we know that as organisms rise in the scale 
of existence reproductive energy is lost. Irish 
peasants have large families ; but the aristocratic 
families, with abundance, frequently become extinct. 
It assumes also that the food-supply is capable only 
of arithmetical increase, whereas scientific agriculture 
is continually refuting this supposition. Men are 
better fed to-day, in all civilized lands, than they 
were when Malthus wrote, notwithstanding the vast 
increase in numbers. In truth, it requires a dense 
population to develop natural resources and a nation's 
wealth consists in its men not less than in its terri- 
tory. With regard to remedies, Malthusianism, in 
attempting to cure one evil, creates a worse. In 
France, where the doctrine of "prudential restraint" 

4 Spencer's Principles of Biology, vol. ii, part vi, chap. xiii. 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



13 



has been most widely accepted, we see statesmen 
and physiologists and moralists alike deploring the 
consequences, while in Paris marriages have de- 
creased, the institution of vice is legally established, 
and one third of the children are born outside of the 
bonds of wedlock. 5 Even in Bavaria, where marriage 
is legally made difficult, there is an exceedingly large 
percentage of illegitimates. 6 If vice is worse than 
poverty, Malthusianism is not its best remedy. 
Nature has secured the perpetuation of the species 
by instincts too powerful to be annihilated or effect- 
ually restrained by legislation, or even entirely by 
the individual will. If children are not born in the 
shelter of the home and under the care of responsi- 
ble parents, they will be thrown into life without 
other protection than society is prepared to provide, 
either by law or charity. 

4. The fear of poverty is not the most potent 
restraint upon the practices of men. The proletarian 
indulges the hope that some of his children may 
prosper and be of service to him in his declining 
years. His very name signifies his proclivity. Upon 
him, therefore, the Malthusian doctrine has but little 
influence. A stronger motive to abstinence from mar- 
riage is found in that pessimism that regards life as 
a scene of suffering and its end an escape from 
misery. Buddha was its great apostle in the East, 
and though his millions of disciples professed to 

B The whole subject is discussed, with valuable recent statistics, by Dr. 
Abel Joire, La Population, Paris, 18S5. 
6 W. Graham's The Social Problem, chap. iii. 



I32 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

believe that life is an evil, and marriage, which is its 
foundation, is a source of sorrow, the swarming pop- 
ulations of Buddhist countries testify to the impo- 
tency of this religious hostility to life in crushing out 
the instinct to render it perpetual. The country of 
Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann is the most prolific 
in Europe, in spite of the pessimism which their 
philosophy inculcates. The same pessimism that 
censures marriage commends suicide, and the prohibi- 
tion of the first is about as rational and effective as 
the recommendation of the other. 

II. 

It is certain that no Malthusian precept or pessi- 
mistic philosophy will ever prevent the fulfillment of 
the command to "multiply and replenish the earth." 
Society cannot, if it would, restrain this tendency ; 
but it has no higher interest, either from an ethical 
or an economical point of view, than the mode in 
which this command is obeyed. The germ of society 
itself is in the family. What is its history and what 
is its normal constitution ? 

1. It is apparent upon a little reflection that the 
same close connection which Malthus points out 
between population and subsistence, between family 
life and economic life, must always have existed. 
A condition of society is inconceivable in which the 
multiplication of human beings and their support 
should have no connection. If private property and 
private marital rights are associated, so are communal 
property and community of wives. If the study of 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



133 



primitive peoples reveals communal property, it also 
reveals a corresponding type of the family. Anthro- 
pologists of the evolutionist school, such as Bachofen, 
McLennan, Spencer, Lubbock, and Giraud-Teulon 
attempt to trace the evolution of the family from a 
primitive form in which sexual unions were tempo- 
rary and promiscuous, as they are in the lower 
animals. 7 Without adducing their arguments, or for 
the present criticizing their results, I simply summar- 
ize their theory. They recognize four stages of pro- 
gression : (1) Promiscuity, in which state men and 
women associate in herds, like other gregarious ani- 
mals ; (2) Polyandry, the union of one woman with 
many men, whose children trace their descent from 
their mother and are supported by the group, con- 
stituting the "maternal family;" (3) Polygyny, the 
union of one man with several women, who are 
under his perpetual authority, and whose children 
take his name, constituting the "paternal family;" 
and finally, (4) Monogamy, the union of one man 
and one woman for life. 8 

2. Consistent evolutionists maintain that the 
present legalized form of the family is only a trans- 
ition to some other and unknown type. Says Dr. 
Letourneau, a French materialistic evolutionist : 

' The latest and most compendious treatment of the whole subject, from 
the evolutionist's point of view, is that of Giraud-Teulon, Les Origines du 
Mariage et de la Famille. The Family, an Historical and Social Study, by 
C. F. and Carrie Butler Thwing, has been published since these lectures 
were written, and confirms many of the positions taken in them. 

8 For a statement of this order of development as a necessary and estab- 
lished order, see Louis Bridel, La Femme et le Droit. 



134 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

" In our European marriage, where the barbarous 
and feudal customs, the legal traditions of ancient 
Rome and Christian ideas, have arrived at a crippled 
compromise, woman is neither slave nor servant ; 
she is simply a minor, and the law makes of the 
conjugal union an association which death alone can 
dissolve, at least in the majority of Catholic 
countries. Will it always be so ? Evidently not. 
In the evolution of societies there is no last word. 
Already, legal divorce, admitted, or upon the point 
of being admitted, in different countries of Europe, 
has destroyed the fiction of monogamic and indis- 
soluble marriage. . . . No form of marriage is abso- 
lutely necessary, and many forms have been tried. 
There will, assuredly, still be innovations. In what 
sense ? We can hardly conjecture ; but it will surely 
be in the sense most useful to society. Utility 
varies with the constitution of societies. Where the 
State does not interest itself in the rearing of chil- 
dren, a more rigorous monogamy is necessary ; the 
family ought to be solidly constituted, for it will be 
only in its bosom that new generations can find 
shelter, protection, education. On the contrary, 
where individual interests go on uniting themselves 
more and more, the State will gradually tend to 
substitute itself for the family in the care of rearing 
its future citizens. Little by little the State will 
occupy itself less with the regulation of marriage, 
and more with the formation of new generations ; 
the care of infancy will become for it a capital 
interest ; sexual unions in themselves will tend to be 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



35 



more and more considered as acts of private life. 
To raise the child, this is what the community will 
aspire to accomplish, and it will charge itself more 
and more with this important care ; then it will 
have no reason for not leaving a much greater lati- 
tude to conjugal contracts." 9 Then follows a mock- 
ing paragraph on the "sanctuary of the family," 
which, for very shame, I forbear from quoting. 

3. It is impossible to separate the socialistic doc- 
trine of property from the socialistic doctrine of the 
family. The one places all property in the hands 
of the State ; the other, consistently and even with 
logical necessity, places the care of children in the 
same hands where the means of subsistence have 
been deposited, leaving individuals to become 
parents under the impulse of elective affinities and 
the State to rear and educate their offspring ! Such 
has been the teaching of communism and socialism 
from Plato down to the present. Community of 
property involves a practical community of wives. 
Every argument that sustains the former sustains 
the latter also. I need not overburden this outline 
with citations to prove the close association between 
the attacks on private property and the war upon 
the family. Robert Owen denounced marriage as 
one of the three curses of society, private wealth 
and religion being the other two. Fourier com- 
mended the abolition of marriage. The socialistic 
programmes openly proclaim the dissolution of the 
family as an end to be desired. " Love ought to 

3 Letourneau, La Sociologie d'apres l'Ethnographie, libre iv, chap, i, xvi. 



I36 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

be free, and relieved from all codes and rituals," 
says the Havre Programme, which also advocates the 
support of children at public cost. At an assembly 
of German socialists in Berlin, one of the orators, 
Jorissen, said that, in the state of the future, only 
love should direct the unions of the sexes. Between 
the wife and the prostitute there was only a quanti- 
tative difference, for both sold themselves for a 
living. Children should belong to the State and be 
maintained by it. 10 Though not universally accepted 
by those present, these views were not opposed on 
any principle and, indeed, could not be by socialists 
without defect of logic. An American advocate of 
socialism, Gronlund, regards marriage as merely a 
"commercial institution," and admits that the new 
organization of society will "considerably modify 
marriage," and will "facilitate divorces." 11 It is 
evident that socialism stands committed to the 
abolition of the family. The monogamic family is 
the source of the most potent motive to the acqui- 
sition of private wealth. Evidence would be super- 
fluous to show that men who are improvident before 
marriage become economical and prudent in the 
family relation. This holds good, notwithstanding 
the powerful motive to saving in anticipation of 
marriage. The most efficient protection of private 
property is that conjugal and parental love that is 
produced only where two beings are indissolubly 
united, and paternity is guarded by a strict fidelity. 

10 Woolsey's Communism and Socialism, p. 257. 

11 Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth, chap. x. 



CHRISTIANITY AND M i A A7. /</ /. 



137 



It is also the most powerful incentive to personal 
industry, the mainspring of all wealth creation. 
Socialistic theorists do not perceive, what is very 
obvious upon reflection, that a social condition in 
which women were common, and in which all chil- 
dren were supported by the public, would be one in 
which idleness and sensuality would drive out indus- 
try and affection, the true factors of wealth, and 
plunge society into universal poverty. Those 
primitive types of society in which tribal property 
and tribal marriage were united, were low in the 
scale of wealth and in every trait of civilization. 
It is because religion sanctions and protects the 
monogamic family that socialism, bent on destroying 
private property, and the family as its cause, hates 
and antagonizes religion also. We do not reach 
the heart of social problems until we realize the 
inseparable connection bstween property, the family, 
and religion, alike threatened by socialism, their 
common foe. As long as Christianity endures, the 
monogamic family will endure ; as long as the love 
of a true wife and her children fills the heart of 
man, private property will be desired and defended 
as a right, for their sakes. Hence it is that social- 
ists reject every form of Christian overture and 
alliance. 

4. It might be scientifically maintained that monog- 
amy is the natural and normal form of sexual union, 
because it is the last term in the order of evolution, 
unless development should return to lower and aban- 
doned forms and become retrogressive. This is a 



I38 SOCdAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

sufficient answer to the evolutionist. It might also 
be argued from the numerical equilibrium of the 
sexes, the proportion of men and women being sub- 
stantially equal. But there is no scientific reason for 
abandoning the idea of the family as absolute from 
the beginning, commencing as a primeval monogamy, 
from which degenerate races have fallen away. This 
doctrine which is taught in the Scriptures still under- 
lies all the great works on jurisprudence and is con- 
firmed by Sir Henry Maine in his investigations into 
ancient law. Even Darwin rejected a universal 
primitive promiscuity as represented by Sir John 
Lubbock, on the ground that even among the anthro- 
poid apes the highest are "strictly monogamous." u 
The derivation of names and relationship from 
the maternal side, adduced by Morgan as evidence of 
polyandry, is otherwise explained by the German 
anthropologist Peschel, who cites numerous instances 
to show the high sense of conjugal fidelity among 
tribes where this strange mode of tracing relationship 
is in vogue. He also asserts that Bachofen's idea of 
a primitive gynaeocracy, or maternal headship, can be 
proved only by adducing ancient myths of uncertain 
date upon which a forced interpretation has been 
placed. 13 The evidence upon which the whole 
theory of the evolution of the family rests is derived 
from the study of the lowest scattered tribes of modern 

n Darwin's Descent of Man, part iii, chap, xxii, p. 590. 

13 Peschel's Races of Man, pp. 218, 237. Since these lectures were deliv- 
ered, Prof. J. G. Schurman, of Cornell University, has published an able 
critique on the views of McLennan and Morgan in his Ethical Import of 
Darwinism, chap. vi. 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



139 



men, and involves the assumption that their practices 
are to be regarded as those of primeval times. The 
prehistoric monogamy of the Aryan races, the wide 
prevalence of the patria potestas, or paternal suprem- 
acy, the ancient ancestor-worship of the Chinese and 
the preservation of ideas of monogamy even among the 
lowest races, — all render vastly more probable a 
partial degeneration from a higher type of family than 
a general primitive promiscuity. Such contributions 
to this subject as that of Robertson Smith, in his 
recent work, " Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia," 
do not reach back far enough in time to determine the 
primeval truth. That every age,' not excluding the 
present, has known something of all the possible devi- 
ations from the normal marriage relation, is highly 
probable ; and, therefore, the fragmentary evidence 
which such writers gather with infinite pains cannot 
solve the problem. A theorist of the fiftieth century 
might argue with equal cogency from certain facts of 
our own land and time, that a Christian people once 
practised polygamy. 

III. 

1. What has Christianity to say to these specula- 
tions ? The time of Christ was one in which the 
earlier Semitic polygamy had been outgrown, though 
successive polygamy was still tolerated by the extreme 
laxity of divorce. That toleration of " hardness of 
heart," which the legislation of Moses permitted with- 
out encouraging, the Rabbi Hillel had so far indulged 
as to grant divorce if the wife burned the food ; and 



I40 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

the popular Rabbi Akiba, who is said to have had 
eighty thousand disciples, allowed the husband to put 
away his wife when he found one more beautiful, or 
upon any arbitrary pretext whatever. After the 
example of Salome, the sister of Herod the Great, 
who repudiated her Indumean husband, women also 
initiated divorce, and the Samaritan woman whom 
Jesus met at the well had had five husbands. Christ 
opposed the popular teaching in his reply to his ques- 
tioners. His doctrine gave to the indissoluble union 
of two persons, which he declared was the divine 
intention from the beginning, a genuine rehabilitation, 
and lifted the marriage relation from the low level of 
mere mutual agreement to the high plane of a religious 
bond, sealing it for the Christian ages with the precept, 
"What God hath joined together, let not man put 
asunder." We have already traced the influence of 
this new enunciation of the absolute principle of 
marriage upon the entire Christian world. Whatever 
difference of opinion there has been upon the essence 
of it, whether it is a status, a civil contract, a sacra- 
ment, or the union of these, there has been no division 
of doctrine as to the form of marriage taught by 
Christ, as an essentially permanent relation between 
one man and one woman, inviolable by all and to be 
abrogated for one cause only, a schism in the flesh 
which marriage has made one. 

2. The family, therefore, as instituted by the 
Creator and explained by Christ is not a mere human 
invention or product of evolution. It consists of 
a husband, a wife, and their children. It is a primor- 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



41 



dial society, a social molecule within the greater 
social organism, through which life is transmitted and 
the whole normally augmented. The divinity of its 
origin is as clearly attested by the physical and men- 
tal aptitudes of its constituent members as by the 
words of Scripture. The eloquent Abbe Vidieu thus 
portrays these aptitudes : " To man God gave power 
as a sceptre, thus establishing him as the head of the 
family ; but of the tenderness of woman he made 
another sceptre more gentle and not less potent. To 
the king he gave justice, to the queen clemency : in 
the heart of man he put courage, but in the heart of 
woman that moral energy with which she overcomes 
suffering. To the one have been confided the keep- 
ing and defence of the family ; to the other the care 
of its happiness. While the chief directs the way, 
sometimes difficult, offering to his companion a sup- 
port, she, by her tenderness, consoles and fortifies 
his heart, diffusing joy even in the midst of the tem- 
pest ; upon the wounds made .by the briers and hard- 
ness of the road the one pours wine, the other balm. 
The family and society are put in relation by the 
man fulfilling the duties of a citizen ; woman, in her 
dwelling, concealing the charms of her virtue and 
devoting herself to her family, at the same time giv- 
ing herself to society. Man dominates by reason, 
woman by goodness ; for the divine ray that descends 
upon each hearthstone, upon the one sheds more of 
light, upon the other more of love. But between the 
heart of man and that of woman is an incessant 
irradiation, a constant interchange of all that is most 



142 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

intimate in human nature, making one soul of these 
two souls, and recomposing outside of themselves 
the ray where affections, cares, and joys unite in the 
person of the child. The family is complete, but duties 
are increased and deepened, the role of each parent 
is more sharply defined. For the child is the hope 
of the family and the nation ; the child is humanity 
perpetuating itself, advancing in the way of perfection 
or retrograding toward the shades of barbarism ; it is 
the alternative between virtue and vice, truth and 
error, light and darkness, love and hate, wealth and 
misery, order and chaos, glory and shame, progression 
and degradation. The child is the fragile and delicate 
blossom which the wind can bruise and the sun 
wither ; it is the little fledgling which the mother 
protects with her wing and shelters with its soft 
warmth ; it is in the blossom of all nature the most 
feeble, the most helpless of beings. It would die 
without its mother ; it is her milk which sustains it ; 
it is her soft hands alone that can touch without 
bruising its delicate members ; her caresses and 
kisses alone can impart the warmth of life." u Its 
first and continuous need is love, and how shall this 
be satisfied if the mother does not watch over it with 
tender solicitude and the father make provision for 
the material wants of both ? 

3. The family constitutes an essential part of the 
moral order. It is within it alone that the best ele- 
ments of human nature, both ethical and economical, 
can be found. It brings to fulfillment the life of man 

14 L'Abbe Vidieu, Famille et Divorce, chapitre i. 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



1 43 



in the duties and responsibilities of paternity. These 
are at once the factors of material wellbeing and of 
moral discipline. The indissoluble bond alone can 
hold man to his duties and perfect in him the indus- 
try, the patience, the temperance, the self-sacrifice 
which condition the completion of his manhood. If 
he can escape the obligations of marriage at will, he 
can withdraw from this school of discipline when- 
ever he feels impatient or indolent, and the whole 
future of the man is lost in vagabondism and self- 
indulgence. But if marriage is so much for man, 
what is it for woman ? It is at once a guard to her 
virtue, a field for her affections, a protection to her 
rights, a vocation for her noblest powers, and an 
opportunity for her self-realization. It is in the home 
where love unites two complementary natures that 
both are brought to perfection. The necessity of 
compromise, of growing together in the interests of 
peace, of mutual helpfulness and forbearance, molds 
the characters of both and wears away the angularities 
of selfishness. But it is above all for the child that 
marriage should be permanent. The child needs 
both father and mother ; the firmness and judgment 
of the one and the gentleness and inspiration of the 
other. Who can estimate the misfortune of one who 
has missed the influence of either of these two fac- 
tors of character ? It is like being born without 
some organ or member of the body. When charity 
and philanthropy have done their best to realize arti- 
ficially the conditions of a home in an asylum for 
orphans, it still seems to us but a dreary place, like 



T44 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



a hospital for the sick. How accursed, then, is that 
social philosophy that would destroy the home, 
establish free marriage as a rule of society, transfer 
the care of children to the impersonal guardianship 
of the State, and render every child an orphan from 
its birth ! 

4. A false or superficial interpretation of the New 
Testament has created the impression in some minds 
that the Christian idea of marriage is vacillating and 
contradictory, sometimes commending and sometimes 
condemning the married state. Nothing can be more 
clear and harmonious than the teachings of Christ 
and his apostles when viewed in the light of their 
special applications. " Marriage," says the writer to 
the Hebrews, "is honourable in all." Paul, in his 
First Letter to Timothy, rebukes those who forbid 
to marry, and exhorts "younger women " to "marry, 
bear children, guide the house." And yet there 
were circumstances under which the rule could not 
be wisely applied. In times of calamity and danger 
he dissuaded from marriage, though even in those 
trying times marriage was not represented as a sin. 
The wedded state might also interfere with spiritual 
duty. When pleasing one's wife prevented pleasing 
the Lord, when the love of wife and children re- 
strained men from the public committment of them- 
selves to Christian faith, when wedlock endangered 
the unequal yoking together of Christians and Pagans, 
with a divided household, Paul counseled against mar- 
riage. There is no reason for thinking that he would 
not display the same conservative and prudent spirit 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



H5 



to-day. It is not the number of children added to 
society, but the number of healthy, well-reared, and 
well-trained children that increases human happiness, 
social prosperity, and moral life. The constitutionally 
feeble, the diseased, the pauperized, the incapable, 
those who cannot provide for the wants of a family, 
ought certainly not to marry. While Christianity 
places no moral virtue in celibacy in itself, it honors 
a voluntary singleness of life, devoted to high moral 
and spiritual aims. The enforced celibacy of the 
clergy is a perversion of Christian teaching, without 
apostolic warrant in either precept or example. It is 
a sufficient refutation of the Romish theory that the 
apostle whom it honors as the first primate of the 
Church is the one whom we certainly know to have 
been a married man. 

IV. 

The union of persons in the family is the ground 
of certain rights, because it controls and modifies that 
unfolding of powers and capacities which underlies 
all other rights as the root of all. Christianity affects 
society by its teachings concerning these ethical rela- 
tions, and therefore enters most influentially into the 
solution of social problems. 

i. When a child is born into the world it is not 
with its own consent, and its relation to its parents 
is not one of contract, but one of status. What does 
the status of a child imply ? As a moral being it will 
in time be capable of duty. It is by nature morally 
free — a person. But personality, with its attributes 



I46 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of obligation to duty and moral freedom, implies 
rights as the essential conditions of self-realization. 
The child's first right is to support. Its second right 
is to instruction and training that will fit it for the 
performance of duty. These rights are self-evident, 
like the laborer's right to the fruit of his labor. But 
every right implies a correlative duty. Whose duty 
is it to support and instruct the child ? Not primarily 
the duty of the State, for the State has not been con- 
sulted upon the question of its being. If the State 
were to determine the conditions of marriage and 
the number of offspring it would be otherwise. If 
ever a society should exist in which the duties of 
support and education should be assumed by the 
State, it would assuredly claim the correlative rights 
that are involved in this obligation. But the child's 
existence is owing to parental, not social action ; and 
therefore the duty of its sustenance and training falls 
upon its parents. And here two important principles 
emerge into light : first, that the parents are morally 
responsible for the welfare and culture of their child, 
and culpable if they have not made provision for the 
discharge of their duties ; and second, that they them- 
selves, though their marriage is at first a contract, have 
entered into a status and created a status for their 
child which they cannot voluntarily dissolve. The 
bearing of this upon divorce is evident, but for the 
present let us consider its relation to inheritance. 
The right of heirship is maintained throughout the 
Scriptures and is inseparably connected with the idea 
of the family as divinely instituted. The historical 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



H7 



researches of Sir Henry Maine have demonstrated 
that inheritance is a universally recognized right, 
natural and fundamental, indissolubly connected with 
filiation, and equitably terminable only for a specific 
cause. 15 Testamentary law, authorizing the disposi- 
tion of property by will, and primogeniture, the exclu- 
sive inheritance of the eldest son, are late and artificial 
additions to early custom, wholly unknown to our 
German and English forefathers until the first was 
borrowed from Roman jurisprudence and the second 
was introduced by feudalism. The right of making 
a will is sometimes used by paternal ambition to 
perpetuate a family name or to secure property from 
being wasted, without regard to the interest of the 
disinherited ; and primogeniture, happily not bor- 
rowed by us from the English law, is certainly a 
perversion of natural right. Testamentary law was 
invented, as its history shows, to secure, and not to 
limit, inheritance. A wholly unwarranted interfer- 
ence is now seriously proposed by certain speculative 
minds in the form of a legal limitation of inheritance, 
fixing by law the maximum of property which may 
be transmitted by a father to his children. No device 
could be more arbitrary, absurd, or inequitable. Ar- 
bitrary, because no rule can be discovered for fixing 
this maximum. Absurd, because every father would 
evade it by transferring his property during his life- 
time. Inequitable, because it disregards the status 
into which a child is born and which it has been the 
object of his father's life to create for his child as 

is Maine's Ancient Law, chap. vi. 



I48 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

well as for himself. It is frequently contended that, 
though we may admit the validity of the right of 
private property during its possessor's lifetime, the 
right is extinguished by his death ; but here it is 
forgotten that testamentary disposition is the act of 
a living man, not a dead one, and that the property 
of an intestate is a part of the status of his family 
who survive him, created by him for them while 
invested with proprietorship. When it is remembered 
that the love of children is usually the strongest mo- 
tive in the production and conservation of wealth, it 
is evident that this species of robbery is as devoid 
of justice as any other socialistic subterfuge for the 
destruction of proprietary rights. It is the glory of 
Christianity that, as Sir Henry Maine has said, " it 
has always maintained the sanctity of wills." The 
right of inheritance is a fundamental postulate of 
Christian theology. "If a son, then an heir," 
reasons the great apostle. There is no nobler 
impulse than that which prompts a father by the 
toil, prudence, and self-sacrifice of his own life to 
offer to his children advantages which he himself has 
never known. 

2. The family is a corporation initiated by contract 
but terminating in a status. It is a moral status 
whose purpose is fulfilled, not in the birth and train- 
ing of children, but in moral love. Marriage, con- 
sidered as a contract merely, scarcely rises above the 
dignity of concubinage. Children are not so much 
the purpose as the blessing of wedlock, for otherwise 
unfruitfulness alone would be a sufficient ground of 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



149 



divorce. If marriage is a moral status, what is 
woman's position in it ? No doubt it partly depends 
upon the usage and customs of a particular time and 
place, for in entering marriage she knows the status 
she may expect. But what, ideally, and in the Chris- 
tian sense, is the status of a married woman ? It is not 
a complete subordination of herself and extinction of 
her moral personality by absorption into the person- 
ality of her husband. She still has rights and duties 
and does not cease to be both free and responsible. 
She is in no sense a slave. It is from that condition 
that Christian marriage has emancipated her. Her 
role is "obedience," but only "in the Lord." The 
moral law, or law of God, intrenches her and consti- 
tutes her defence. Her husband cannot rightly com- 
pel her to disregard it, and she is for herself the 
judge of its applications. The union is a completely 
ethical one, for to her duty to obey is correlated her 
right to be loved. " Husbands, love your wives," is 
as imperative as, " Wives, be obedient to your hus- 
bands." Marriage is a subordination of the wife to 
the leadership of her husband, but cannot be a 
renunciation of personality. She has rights. She 
may think and believe and even act contrary to her 
husband's direction. Has she also a right to inde- 
pendent property ? This must depend upon the pre- 
marital contract, for marriage is a union of persons, 
not an annihilation of preexisting rights, which the 
wife may choose to retain. In our Christian States 
this right is now generally conceded. The wisdom 
and justice of merging her property with her hus- 



150 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

band's estate must be determined by specific circum- 
stances. Her natural right to a share of her 
husband's property is very clear. As co-producer of 
his wealth and as dependent upon him by her subor- 
dination in family life, she is evidently entitled to 
support and inheritance. Otherwise she would often 
lose the fruits of her labors. " The provision for 
the widow," says Sir Henry Maine, "was attributable 
to the exertions of the Church, which never relaxed 
its solicitude for the interest of wives surviving their 
husbands, winning, perhaps, one of the most ardu- 
ous of its triumphs when, after exacting for two or 
three centuries an express promise from the husband 
at marriage to endow his wife, it at length succeeded 
in engrafting the principle of dower on the custom- 
ary law of all western Europe." 16 Within fifty years 
the legal status of married women has wholly 
changed. Under the common law, the family was a 
legal unit, represented by the husband. Under mod- 
ern statutes, in most of our American States, it is 
now a legal duality, in which two distinct legal per- 
sons are recognized. Husband and wife are co-equal 
partners, with certain immunities on the side of the 
wife and certain liabilities on the side of the hus- 
band. She can sequester all of her property and 
claim complete support from her husband for herself 
and her children. Within the period from i860 to 
1878, under this regime, in Massachusetts marriages 
increased only four per cent., divorces more than 
one hundred per cent., and population forty-five per 

16 Maine, op. cit., chap. vii. 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 151 

cent., showing that marriages are relatively decreas- 
ing and divorces increasing at an enormous rate. 
The new laws have been associated with new indus- 
trial employments for women. In 1840 only seven 
occupations were open to women. In 1883 there were 
nearly three hundred. 17 Connected with these legal 
and industrial changes are the boarding-house life, 
the factory-girl slavery, and the shop-girl bondage of 
our decade, with their temptations and hardships. 
Marriage tends to be regarded as a sexual partner- 
ship, to which the home is unnecessary, children are 
an impediment, and divorce is a frequent termination. 
Professor Ely reports that in a single New England 
factory-town of thirty thousand inhabitants, he found 
two hundred couples living together outside the bonds 
of wedlock. For all these evils, only too real and too 
serious, connected with a practical Malthusianism, 
involving both vice and crime, Christianity has a 
remedy. It is the old one offered by Paul : " Let the 
younger women marry, bear children, guide the 
house." 

3. The spirit of our times favors the further 
" emancipation " of woman, but it is well to be sure 
in what her true emancipation consists before giving 
reinforcement to the ranks of the radicals. The 
next stadium in the proposed programme of progress 
is the legal establishment of woman's political per- 
sonality. I do not see how it can be logically with- 
held from unmarried women who have reached the 
years of majority and are self-supporting. The 

17 The Married Woman's Statutes, by Jonathan Smith, p. 10. 



152 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



reason for withholding suffrage does not lie in sex, 
but in the family. The Christian idea of marriage 
precludes the universal suffrage of women. A fam- 
ily is normally represented through its responsible 
head. That head, according to the Christian as well 
as the historic conception, is the husband and father. 
If the wife is clothed with political power, she has 
every right with her husband. She must then bear 
the burden equally of every duty. This involves a 
divided responsibility for the wellbeing of the family. 
She must use her property for the support of herself, 
her children, and her husband, as he now must use 
his. It is but simple justice. Most married women 
will prefer their present condition to this double 
headship. To invest wives with political sovereignty 
is to divide the household and to introduce into the 
married state a new cause of disputation and disrup- 
tion. It destroys that unity which is the first essen- 
tial to an ideal family life. 

4. There remains but little time in which to speak 
of the dissolution of marriage. It is the less neces- 
sary in this presence, because the Christian doctrine 
on that subject has been admirably expounded in the 
lucid and conclusive little volume by President 
Hovey on "The Scripture Law of Divorce." There 
is but one cause for which the dissolution of the mar- 
riage bond can be granted, according to the law of 
Christ. Separation, temporary or permanent, how- 
ever, is a proper alternative to continued marital rela- 
tions when the ends of human existence cannot 
otherwise be attained. The Christian Church is 



CHRISTIANITY AND MARRIAGE. 



153 



bound absolutely by this high ideal and it is the 
duty of all men to aim at its realization. As Dr. 
Hovey says : " Civil governments sometimes find it 
impracticable to make their laws touching divorce 
agree precisely with the divine law. The wickedness 
of the people may forbid this. Yet the more nearly 
those laws can be brought to the evangelical stand- 
ard, and properly executed, the more useful will they 
be to the people. And it is difficult to overestimate 
the educational power of civil laws, and the impor- 
tance of bringing them into perfect accord with the 
true principles of morality." 18 It is good legal 
ground that the nature of wedlock implies its per- 
petuity for life, and this is always assumed by at 
least one of the contracting parties. " Eternity," 
says Dr. Paul Janet, " so truly enters into the nature 
of love, that love would not venture to ask anything, 
or to grant anything without promising eternity. Its 
first acts are always oaths of fidelity without end, 
and even when it practises deception, it is obliged to 
use feigned words, or it would obtain nothing. It is 
urged that the heart has rights, and that vows of 
eternity are impossible. I acknowledge that love has 
rights for the forming of the conjugal union, but it 
has none for dissolving it. To the principle of the 
heart's liberty we must oppose that of the heart's 
fidelity ; and herein we assign to it an office more 
beautiful, and a glory more pure, than if we claimed 
for it the privilege of giving itself up to chance and 
of changing its office without ceasing. I confess 

" The Scriptural Doctrine of Divorce, by Alvah Hovey, D.D., pp. 72, 73. 



i54 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



that to require of the heart an attachment which 
cannot be given up demands grave reasons. I dis- 
cern two such reasons, which appear to me to be 
irrefutable : the dignity of the wife and the interest 
of the children." 19 

19 Janet, La Famille, pp. 300, 303. 



VI. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS 
OF EDUCATION. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
EDUCATION. 



I. EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL FUNCTION, 
i . Unconscious and Conscious Education. 

2. Oriental Education. 

3. Classical Education. 

II. CHRISTIANITY AS AN EDUCATING POWER. 

1 . The Christian Conception of Education. 

2. The Historic Influence of Christianity. 

3. The Cultural Breadth of Christianity. 

4. The Triumphs of Christian Culture. 

5. Commenius and Milton. 

III. CHRISTIANITY AND CONTEMPORARY EDUCA- 
TION. 

1. Sciolism in Pedagogics. 

2. The Attack on Religion in the Schools. 

3. The Relation of Christianity to our Schools. 

(1) Ours a Christian Nation. 

(2) Our Higher Education Christian. 

(3) The Theorists Commend Religion in Education. 

4. The Secularization of the Schools. 

5. The Cause of this Secularization. 

6. Conclusions : 

(1) The State cannot impart a Complete Education. 

(2 ) The Family and the Church must complete Edu- 

cation. 

(3) Christian Teachers must do their Duty. 



VI. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
EDUCATION. 

I. 

i. The unfolding of a human being, like the growth 
of a plant, depends largely upon its surroundings. 
What soil, air, and sunshine are to the plant, family 
influence, social customs, and public opinion are to 
the child. Long before conscious purposes of human 
development were formed education existed ; for the 
imitative instinct in the presence of unreflecting ex- 
ample is sufficient to call into action many of the 
human faculties. A continuity of life runs through 
all human history and our education began before 
we were born. The principle of heredity extends 
not only to organic descent, but also to intellectual 
and moral development. Language, literature, law, 
and science constitute a veritable inheritance. Each 
generation may begin where its predecessor ended, 
but only on the condition of some organizing effort 
to acquaint the young with the history and acquisi- 
tions of the past. This, however, even very crude 
peoples undertake and accomplish. Ideals of human 
life, consciously or unconsciously, are formed in the 
mind, and these become the educational types of dif- 
ferent ages and nations. At last they are gathered 



158 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

in a conscious purpose. Institutions are then created 
to mold the young after these ideals, and thus edu- 
cation comes to be a social function. 

To educate a child is to enable it to fulfil its life- 
plan and realize its destiny. Organized educational 
work involves the clear conception of an end to be 
attained, the conscious apprehension in clear-cut form 
of the child's nature and future. Every people ad- 
vanced beyond the rudimentary condition of savagery 
has such an idea of the end to which education fur- 
nishes the means. " The national education," says 
Dr. Barnard, " is at once a cause and an effect of the 
national character ; and accordingly the history of 
education affords the only ready and perfect key to 
the history of the human race and of each nation in 
it — an unfailing standard for estimating its advance 
or retreat upon the line of human progress." 1 

2. Among the oriental nations the individual counts 
for nothing. His destination is a place in a complex, 
stationary, and completed social framework, and his 
education is shaped with the end of adjusting him to 
his place. In China the mind looks backward, never 
forward, and the type of culture may be called ances- 
tral. Every human being is taught to be like his 
fathers, to reverence them as deities, and all personal 
spontaneity is rigorously repressed. The caste disci- 
pline of India is similar in its retrospective tendency, 
training every child, according to the one of the four 
castes to which he belongs by birth, to take the place 
of his forefathers. Persian education is built upon 

1 Quoted in Painter's History of Education, introduction. 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 1 59 

the stability of the State, and service to the sovereign 
is the end of all endeavor. The ancient Hebrews 
molded the young upon a theocratic pattern more 
elevated and noble than any other oriental concep- 
tion, shaping the entire life for service to God, and 
thus placing the moral development above the intel- 
lectual. 

3. The classical nations of antiquity regarded the 
State as the end of existence, the individual as the 
means of its strength and perpetuity. They differed 
from the oriental peoples in conceiving the high 
development of the individual as a desirable object, 
but only as subsidiary to the ulterior purpose of 
glorifying public life. The Greek and Roman theo- 
ries of education — the martial training of Lycurgus, 
the aesthetic culture of Pythagoras, the dialectic prac- 
tice of the Sophists, the philosophic politics of Cicero, 
and the rhetorical system of Ouintilian — all contem- 
plate the preparation of the few for whom these 
phases of education were designed for the public 
duties of citizenship. Nowhere in antiquity, nowhere 
outside of Christendom, do we find the full and har- 
monious development of man for his own sake re- 
garded as the end of education. 

. II. 

1. With the advent of Christianity a new concep- 
tion entered the minds of men. It was not dis- 
tinctly formulated either by the Founder of Chris- 
tianity himself or by any of his chosen apostles, 
but its germ was latent in the new idea of man. 



l6o SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

"Be ye perfect," said Jesus, "even as your Father 
in heaven is perfect." At first this perfection was 
understood as a moral perfection, a growth in right- 
eousness. But reflection has developed this new 
idea into a vastly broader and more symmetrical one. 
It was much to conceive of man as capable of any 
form of perfection and to place this before him as 
a goal to be attained by every individual. Holiness 
is wholeness. Slowly but logically the conception 
has grown into the modern Christian ideal of edu- 
cation. Not only moral character but intellectual 
power belongs to that Being in whose image man 
is created. The realization of man's complete 
nature as the image of God involves his growth of 
mind, his perception of plan and wisdom in the 
creation of the world. Each day should add some 
new lesson in the divine tuition. As a son of God, 
study becomes to him a part of worship. " To 
know, in order to be," is the new maxim of Christian 
faith. 

2. We must not forget, however, that this now 
familiar contemporary idea is recent and has a his- 
tory that has led to doubt concerning the attitude 
of Christianity toward certain forms of culture. In 
the early centuries of the era which it has created, 
Christianity claimed no alliance with the intellectual 
forces of the world and introduced no scientific 
renaissance. Its primary work was moral and spirit- 
ual, and this required other instruments than mental 
culture. Its next task was the humanizing of the 
Northern barbarians, whose multitudes were brought 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. l6l 

to the standard of the cross by moral object-lessons 
rather than by a scientific process. The time was 
not ripe for the unfolding of those resources of 
knowledge that lay concealed, awaiting the prepara- 
tion of the nations for their discovery and utilization. 
The first need of the world was a moral regeneration. 
This Christianity gave. The next was the refining 
and civilizing of the Northern races. This also 
Christianity supplied amid the ruins of the Roman 
Empire. It did it through those schools, now 
scoffed at as barren and unproductive, in which the 
intellect of Europe was drilled in the processes of 
dialectic, and rendered capable of logical analysis. 
It was a needed schooling, the only one the age 
could bear. Then followed the training in the old 
humanities, the opening and exposition of the 
ancient classics, lost books to the lands that pro- 
duced them, new books to the races of the North, 
at the period of the revival of letters. Finally, 
the trained and sharpened intellect was turned 
toward nature, whose great banquet board of truth 
lay all untouched, ready for the eager appetite. The 
modern sciences became the food of the robust 
mind, made powerful and agile in the palaestra of 
scholasticism. " The past," says Emerson, in rebuke 
of the modern scoffers, "has baked your loaf, and 
in the strength of its bread you would break up the 
oven." " Not a man in Europe now," as John 
Henry Newman reminds us, and he might have said 
in America also, "who talks bravely against the 
Church, but owes it to the Church that he can talk 
at all." 



1 62 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

There are two co-equal elements in true human 
education : discipline and instruction. Christianity 
has neglected neither. The first requisite in every 
person's training is moral discipline. That was Chris- 
tianity's first gift to the world. It trained men to 
reverence and love truth, to suffer for it, to die for 
it. The next need is power of analysis. This was 
given in the much-abused scholasticism. The rude 
nations of the North had known nothing like it. It 
was to them what a problem in algebra is to a 
modern plowboy, a lesson of priceless value, though 
the answer itself may be unimportant. Then comes 
the need of information. The past rose up to 
instruct men through the lips of Homer and Plato, 
Cicero and Caesar. But the present also required a 
voice. The past supplied a language. Astrology 
becomes astronomy, alchemy becomes chemistry, 
geology and biology and the other newborn sciences 
appear. What are they, all of them, but the facts 
of nature poured into the molds of logic which 
scholasticism had prepared ; their very names, the 
" ologies," signifying the special logics ? 

3. It cannot be truly said that Christianity has 
been the foe of knowledge. 2 It has preserved what 

2 Those who have- read Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion 
and Science may feel disposed to question this statement. It should be re- 
membered that I use " Christianity " as a synonym with " the influence of 
Jesus," not as equivalent to the historical Church. The spirit of Jesus is ex- 
pressed in his words : " Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make 
you free " (John 8 : 32). While Christians have not always welcomed truth 
which seemed to them contradictory of truth already accepted, and, therefore, 
falsehood, the spirit of Christ, whenever it has really moved men to know 
the truth, and has broadened their minds sufficiently to receive it, has 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 1 63 

antiquity possessed, and prepared for and incited to 
what the present has discovered. It must be admit- 
ted, however, that it places moral before intellectual 
development, but who that reflects will not ? " Seek 
ye first the kingdom of heaven," said our Lord, but 
immediately added, "and all these things" — the 
necessities of human life on its loftiest as well as 
on its lowest plane — "shall be added unto you." 
Asceticism, it is true, was abnormally developed in 
the early Church. It cultivated a spirit of " other- 
worldliness," as George Eliot calls it, repressing the 
body and its pleasures, and creating a hatred of the 
world. Such was not the spirit of Jesus or his 
immediate disciples. They overcame the world, 
indeed, but not by destroying it. Their triumph 
was a moral victory, not a physical extinction. 
Christ came eating and drinking ; he sought the com- 
panionship of men ; he honored marriage and main- 
tained the sacredness of family life ; he blessed the 
little children, and taught his disciples to trace the 
presence of God in nature ; he prayed in his last 
recorded petition for his own, not that they might 

opened their sympathies for real knowledge of all kinds. As a distin- 
guished student and teacher of history has said in a valuable work on this 
subject. " The work of Christianity has been mighty indeed. Through 
these two thousand years, despite the waste of its energies on all the things 
its blessed Founder most earnestly condemned, — on fetich and subtlety and 
war and pomp, — it has undermined servitude, mitigated tyranny, given 
hope to the hopeless, comfort to the afflicted, light to the blind, bread to the 
starving, joy to the dying, and this work continues. And its work for 
science, too, has been great. It has fostered science often. Nay, it has 
nourished that feeling of self-sacrifice for human good, which has nerved 
some of the bravest men for these battles." — The Warfare of Science, by 
Andrew D. White, ll.d. 



1 64 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

be taken out of the world, but that they might be 
kept from the evil. If Tertullian and Chrysostom 
and Jerome condemned all intercourse with the 
world and all seeking after natural knowledge, 
others, as Basil, for example, warmly commended 
culture. " We ought to be armed with every re- 
source, and to this end the reading of poets, histo- 
rians, and orators is very useful," says Basil. 3 
Charlemagne wisely wrote : " Although it is better 
to do than to know, yet it is necessary to know, in 
order to be able to do. . . . Hence we admonish you 
not to neglect the study of the sciences." 4 
Throughout the history of our era we trace the 
affinity of the Christianized mind for every noble 
form of knowledge ; and yet it must be confessed 
that Christianity everywhere gives the first place to 
personal righteousness. 

4. If the perfection of the Christian idea of educa- 
tion seems the result of a slow development, it forms 
no exception to the general law of growth. Christian- 
ity has had to deal with men as it found them. It 
has converted pagans into Christians, barbarians into 
scholars, dialecticians into scientists. If an ecclesias- 
tical hierarchy at Rome has impeded rather than 
advanced the progress of human knowledge, it is not 
because it has been fettered by any doctrines of 
Christ, but because it has been governed by a self- 
centred conservatism. The " Holy Roman Empire " 
was as distinctly a human creation as the Empire of 

3 Quoted by Painter, op. cit. p. 99. 
* Quoted by Painter, op. cit. p. 105. 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 1 65 

the Caesars. Papal obstructiveness to scientific pro- 
gress has been a purely strategic policy prompted by 
the instinct of self-preservation. It has ignomin- 
iously failed, though Christianity itself has triumphed. 
Of all the intellectual influences that have ever 
appeared in history, Christianity alone has matured 
its fruit. Arabian learning was, indeed, brilliant, but 
proved short-lived. It lacked the element of intellec- 
tual vitality — consecration to truth. It appealed to 
the sword instead of to the soul of man, and perished 
by the sword it had unsheathed. Romanism has 
proved retrogressive and incapable of leading civiliza- 
tion, because it has been wanting in faith. Professing 
exclusive authority from God, it has feared to trust 
the reason and conscience which God placed in man 
for the study of God's world. Its last and losing 
battle has been in the struggle to confine the mind to 
the study of those "humanities " which in the begin- 
ning it treated with distrust, the classic writings of 
paganism. It has resisted that naturalism which 
prompted the scientific movement and pervades the 
intellectual training of to-day. It has staked all on 
the ridiculous tenet that heathen classics are more 
compatible with Christian faith and life than com- 
munion with God's works in the realm of nature. 
Even Protestantism has but slowly and reluctantly 
broken from the chain of tradition that held men to 
merely verbal study ; but, following its better lights, 
it has cast the chain aside, and the investigation of 
nature is now led, as it should be, by Christian men. 
5. It was the gentle pastor Commenius who, in 



1 66 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

the seventeenth century, put in final phrase the 
Christian ideal of education. " Education," he says, 
" is a development of the whole man." A Christian 
poet, John Milton, in the same age, phrased the 
doctrine thus : " The end, then, of learning is to 
repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to 
know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love 
him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the 
nearest by possessing our souls of virtue, which, being 
united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the 
highest perfection. But because our understanding 
cannot in this body found itself but on sensible 
things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God 
and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the 
visible and inferior creature, the same method is 
necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. 
And seeing every nation affords not experience and 
tradition enough for all kinds of learning, therefore 
we are chiefly taught the languages of those people 
who have at any time been most industrious after 
wisdom ; so that language is but the instrument con- 
veying to us things useful to be known. And though 
a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues 
that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not 
studied the solid things themselves, as well as the 
words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be 
esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman 
competently wise in his mother dialect only." 5 This 
remarkable passage at once sets forth, in its quaint 
fashion, both the end and the method of true educa- 

b Milton's Tractate on Education. 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 1 67 

tion, acknowledging the equal claims of the humani- 
ties and the sciences ; and may be regarded as the 
most succinct and satisfactory judgment that has yet 
been uttered on the philosophy of human development. 

III. 

1. We are living in a time when the abstract idea 
of education exercises more influence over the minds 
of men than it has ever exercised before in the 
history of the world. Ours is an age in which faith 
in dynamic agencies is boundless. " Change," "Pro- 
gress," "Evolution," are the watchwords of the hour. 
And yet a thoughtful investigator discovers more 
doubt, antagonism, and contradiction among educa- 
tional theorists and their disciples among teachers 
than any other age reveals. Ends, means, and meth- 
ods the most opposite are lauded and applied, some- 
times as new and final discoveries, and almost always 
in the name of "science." It is an age of sciolists. 
As soon as anything calls itself a "science," it has 
authority. The mind of the moderns has a special 
reverence for the " practical " also. But the sphere 
of practice is very dimly outlined. Chemistry, for 
example, is usually praised as a "practical" study 
and moral philosophy is regarded as less "practical ; " 
notwithstanding the fact that there are but few 
instances in the life of the average man when a per- 
sonal knowledge of chemical science is strictly neces- 
sary, while moral conduct, as Matthew Arnold says, 
"is three fourths of life." It is regarded " practical " 
to name all the bones in the human body, while the 



1 68 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

study of an oration of Cicero's would not be so 
esteemed ; and yet one is called upon to make a 
speech more often than to give the scientific name of 
any anatomical part. 

2. A schoolbook on science is considered obsolete 
if it does not contain last year's discoveries ; and yet 
precepts and doctrines that have been slowly verified 
in the experience of centuries are arbitrarily excluded 
from our schoolrooms. It is generally admitted that 
the principles of Christianity have led the world's 
advancement, and yet it would be hazardous for the 
author of a textbook designed for our public schools 
to say so. The principle governing the first grant of 
public lands for purposes of education, in 1785, was 
stated : " Religion, morality, and knowledge being 
necessary to good government and the happiness of 
mankind, schools and the means of education shall be 
forever encouraged." 6 See what a change a century 
has made. "That is my 'Political Economy,' said a 
Christian college president, "prepared for high- 
schools and colleges. I sent it the other day to one 
of our state superintendents of education ; but it was 
returned to me with the note that its first sentence 
condemned it for use in public schools." That first 
sentence was : " The source of all wealth is the 
beneficence of God." 7 A series of geographies, 
accurate in details, revised to date, and beautifully 
printed, was rejected by the school board of Chicago 

11 Quoted by Painter, op. cit. p. 316. 

7 This case and the following one are reported by the late A. A. Hodge, 
D.D., in the New Princeton Review for January, 1887, p. 29. 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 1 69 

after having been in use a year, because these books 
recognized the existence of God. It was only ten years 
ago that Dr. Woolsey wrote, in his Political Science : 
" We have not yet quite reached the extreme that the 
teacher must never mention God to children's ears, 
but it must logically come, if modern unbelief is to 
have the career that many look for." 8 The logic 
of events has confirmed the logic of this unwelcome 
prediction, and in less than a decade it has been 
fulfilled. 

3. This change has come about, notwithstanding 
three considerations, which separately, but much more 
together, ought to have rendered it impossible : (1) 
ours is a Christian nation ; (2) the superior education 
of this country has been chiefly in the hands of 
Christian teachers, in schools founded by Christian 
men, with an increasing percentage of Christian 
students ; and (3) the general opinion of educational 
philosophers is that morality and religion are desirable 
and necessary elements in human education. 

(1) Justice Shea maintains that while the Constitu- 
tion of the United States does not formally recognize 
the existence of God or set forth any legislative pro- 
fession of faith, " its entire context and the laws in 
pursuance thereof, like the form of that more ancient 
Saxon government upon which ours was molded, 
declare, with approved wisdom and decorum, by 
necessary presupposition and inference, that the 
tenets of the Christian religion lie at the foundations 

8 Woolsey's Political Science, vol. ii, p. 414. 



170 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



of the government and are to protect and regulate its 
operations." 9 

Daniel Webster, in interpreting the national Con- 
stitution, says : " There is nothing we look for with 
more certainty than the principle that Christianity is 
a part of the law of the land — general, tolerant 
Christianity, independent of sects and parties." 10 Kent 
and Story have held the same doctrine and the courts 
have repeatedly embodied the principle. And yet 
a nation whose Constitution was devised by men who, 
at Franklin's suggestion, began their deliberations 
with prayer to God; the session of whose national 
Congress is opened regularly with prayer ; whose 
armies and navies are provided with Christian chap- 
lains paid from the public treasury to conduct religious 
exercises ; whose magistrates are sworn into office in 
the name and presence of God, and by kissing the 
Book the sanctity of which seals the solemnity of the 
oath, and whose judicial action is based on the 
validity of sworn testimony, — such a nation has in 
public office men who reject schoolbooks because 
they contain the name of God, and carefully guard the 
future citizen from all mention and knowledge of the 
Being in whose name the most solemn acts of citizen- 
ship are by law required to be performed. 

(2) Not only is this a Christian nation in its tradi- 
tions and legal implications, but in its essence and 
development. That the nation was founded by 

9 George Shea's The Nature and Form of the American Government 
Founded in the Christian Religion, p. 13. 

10 Quoted by Dr. A. A. Hodge, loc. cit. 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 



171 



Christian men does not need even to be asserted. 
The growth of Christianity in the United States 
from 1 800 to 1 880 exceeded its growth in the entire 
world during the first eight centuries after Christ, 
although it was accepted as a state religion by the 
Roman Empire in the fourth century of its era. 
Notwithstanding the enormous addition of hetero- 
geneous and non-Christian elements by immigration, 
excluding now the Roman Catholic growth, the 
relative increase of evangelical Christians alone is 
something impressive. According to Dr. Dorchester, 
in the eighty years from the beginning of our century 
to 1880, when the last census was taken, the evangel- 
ical communicants in the United States increased 
from one in every fifteen to one in every five inhabi- 
tants. The increase of ministers has been nearly as 
rapid and that of church organizations even more rapid. 
In these eighty years the evangelical communicants 
have increased three times as rapidly as the entire 
population. The educational work shows equally 
surprising progress. The property of denominational 
colleges was, in 1880, three times as great as that of 
all non-denominational colleges together, including 
those founded by the State. Four fifths of all the 
collegiate students in the country, in 1880, were in 
denominational colleges. The increase of these col- 
leges was five times that of the non-denominational. 
The increase of students in them was more than five 
times that in the non-denominational. While popula- 
tion increased fourfold, denominational colleges and 
the students in them increased nearly eightfold, or 



172 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



nearly twice as rapidly as population. 11 And yet 
it is considered an objection to a textbook for use in 
our public schools if it contains the name of the Deity. 
(3) Now let us pass from these tedious figures to 
ask if the authorities on the science of education 
counsel this exclusion of religion. I take down from 
the shelves of my library the six best known and most 
reputable works on education in my possession and 
quote the first words upon which my eye falls relating 
to the subject. First, let us listen to Horace Mann, 
who, as the author and defender of the public school 
system in our country, is entitled to be heard. He 
says : " Our system earnestly inculcates all Christian 
morals ; it founds its morality on a basis of religion ; 
it welcomes the religion of the Bible. ... I could not 
avoid regarding the man who should oppose the 
religious education of the young as an insane man." l2 
A most distinguished French writer, Paroz, says : 
" We can say of those who would banish Christ from 
education and the school what St. Paul said of the 
hostile Jews, that they are the enemies of the human 
race." 13 A celebrated German authority, Karl 
Schmidt, in speaking of the doctrines of Jesus, 
writes : " This is absolute truth, doctrine for all time, 
in the appropriation and realization of which lies the 
task of mankind." l4 Another German writer, Rosen- 

11 These statistics are taken from Dr. Daniel Dorchester's The Problem 
of Religious Progress. 

12 Horace Mann," On Religious Education," in Massachusetts Reports. 

13 Paroz, Histoire Universelle de la Pedagogic 

14 Schmidt, Geschichte der Padagogik, which Painter says " is probably 
the ablest work that has yet been written on educational history." 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 173 

kranz, of whose book it has been said that " it alone 
justifies its philosophy of education by an appeal to 
psychology and history," assigns to religion three 
educational ends : " (1) consecration ; (2) the initia- 
tion of the youth into the forms of worship as found 
in some particular religion, and (3) his reconciliation 
with his lot." 15 If it be thought that these last cita- 
tions express foreign rather than the best American 
ideas upon the subject, we can find no better known 
authority than Dr. W. T. Harris, who says : " Faith 
is a secular virtue as well a theological virtue, and 
whosoever teaches another view of the world . . . 
teaches a doctrine subversive of faith in this peculiar 
sense, and also subversive of man's life in all that 
makes it worth living." 16 One might expect to find 
a different view in Herbert Spencer's work on " Edu- 
cation," but we read : "The discipline of science is 
superior to that of our ordinary education, because of 
the religious culture that it gives." Is Spencer also 
among the prophets? "Doubtless," he adds, "in 
much of the science that is current, there is a pervad- 
ing spirit of irreligion ; but not in that true science, 
which has passed beyond the superficial into the 
profound. ' ' 17 Then follows a quotation from Professor 
Huxley, too excellent and pertinent to be omitted : 
" True science and true religion are twin-sisters, and 
the separation of either from the other is sure to 
prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in 

is Rosenkranz, The Philosophy of Education (Bracken's translation). 
10 Quoted by Dr. Hodge from the Journal of Social Science, May, 1884. 
17 Spencer's Education : Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, p. 90. 



174 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



proportion as it is religious ; and religion flourishes 
in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firm- 
ness of its basis. The great deeds of philosophers 
have been less the fruit of their intellect than of the 
direction of that intellect by an eminently religious 
tone of mind. Truth has yielded herself rather to 
their patience, their love, their single-heartedness, and 
their self-denial, than to their logical acumen." 18 

Is it not something anomalous that a people whose 
common law is pervaded with Christianity, among 
whom voluntary adhesion to that faith has lately 
increased beyond all precedent, should witness among 
themselves a secularization of education so absolute 
as to drive from the schools that religion which the 
greatest authorities on the training of the mind con- 
sider essential to its completeness, and which even 
the most radical scientific philosophers of our age 
have esteemed as a twin-sister of science itself ? Let 
us first correctly apprehend the fact, then inquire into 
its cause, and if possible discover a method of final 
rectification. 

4. "The manifest tendency of the time," says 
Professor Payne, of the University of Michigan, " is 
toward the secularization of the school. The modern 
State has become an educator and relegates religious 
instruction to the family and the Church." 19 It is a 
" tendency " rather than a realized condition, of which 



18 Quoted by Herbert Spencer immediately after the sentence just quoted 
from him. 

19 Payne's Contributions to the Science of Education, Essay on The Sec- 
ularization of the School. 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. I 75 

this writer speaks, but it is one of rapid growth. In 
the New England States this secularization has not 
proceeded so far as in the West. In Massachusetts 
the daily reading of a portion of the Bible is com- 
manded by law, but there is a "conscience clause" 
for objectors. In Ohio the Bible is excluded from 
the public schools under a decision of the Supreme 
Court. In Wisconsin it is an offence punishable with 
a fine for a teacher to give any religious instruction 
in the public schools. In the high school of Mil- 
waukee materialism is said to be openly taught. In 
a land where no high office can be entered upon with- 
out a solemn oath in the presence of God, it is legal 
to deny that he governs the universe or even has 
existence, but illegal to assert the reality of his 
being. Could Washington have dreamed of such a 
state of public opinion, when he said : "Reason and 
experience both forbid us to expect that national 
morality can prevail in exclusion of religious princi- 
ples " ? 20 

5. What is the cause of the growing secularization 
of the schools ? It is not any incompatibility of our 
Constitution with Christianity, it is not the decadence 
of Christian faith or the relative diminution of 
Christians, it is not the conclusion of high authorities 
that religion is detrimental to the child. All this has 
been clearly shown. Nor is it the opposition of 
Romanists to the use of a Protestant version of the 
Bible. A prominent Catholic newspaper condemns 
the exclusion of the Bible from the public schools of 

20 Washington's Farewell Address. 



176 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Cincinnati and adds : " To us godless schools are still 
less acceptable than sectarian schools, and we object 
less to the reading of King James's Bible, even in 
the schools, than we do to the exclusion of all reli- 
gious instruction. Even Protestantism of the ortho- 
dox stamp is far less evil than German infidelity." 21 
What then is the cause of this growing seculariza- 
tion ? Professor Payne states it thus : " Education 
has become, or is rapidly becoming, a function of the 
State. . . . With the State as educator, the school 
becomes a civil institution, and as such it must 
abandon religious instruction, which must be rele- 
gated to the family and the Church." And yet he 
goes on to say that " the public school must teach 
morality, because morality is an element of good citi- 
zenship." Mr. M. J. Savage puts the case very vig- 
orously. He says : " The State has no right to set 
itself up as a life insurance organization concerning 
eternity. It is none of the business of the govern- 
ment whether my soul goes to one place in the next 
world or the other. The State should concern itself 
as to how I behave myself as a citizen of this world ; 
and there its jurisdiction ends." n The cause of the 
secularization of the schools seems to be the idea 
that religion is no part of the State's function. We 
must distinguish between recognition and affirmation. 
The organic law of our nation and of the several 
states recognises religion and offers it protection, but 
does not affirm it. It may, therefore, permit religion 

21 The New York Tablet, quoted by Payne, loc. cit. 

22 Savage's Social Problems, article Common School Education. 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 



177 



to be taught, but cannot teach it. The State, as a 
state, cannot teach religion, because teaching involves 
a choice between doctrines which the State is not 
empowered to make. 23 

6. From this position we may draw three conclu- 
sions : (1) The State cannot impart a complete edu- 
cation. If the Christian conception of it as the 
development of the whole man is the true one, an 
ideal education is beyond the reach of the State. 
The State has no theory of manhood, only one 
of citizenship. Even this has been crude enough. 
It has given us a system of public schools of great 
value, but very imperfectly adapted to its own end of 
producing citizens. The industrial side of develop- 
ment has been left almost entirely out of sight. The 
result is that we have a top-heavy system whose fruits 
are now beginning to be harvested and they prove 
bitter fruits. The old system of apprenticeship has 
passed away. We have millions of boys with the 
habits and tastes of school-boys but without the skill 
and industry of self-supporting workers. Our skilled 
workmen have to be imported. The learned profes- 
sions are overcrowded. Clerks and small traders 
crowd one another in a destructive competition. The 
education imparted by our public school system is 

23 It is certainly contrary to the spirit of our national Constitution " to re- 
quire compulsory support, by taxation or otherwise, of religious instruction ; " 
and, as Judge Cooley says (Constitutional Limitations) , is "not lawful under 
any of the American constitutions." But it is equally clear that the exclu- 
sion of a book, provided it cannot be proved injurious, or of a teacher, 
provided he merely expresses his own views, from a school supported by the 
State, on account of a religious doctrine -which is not sectarian, is a religious 
persecution. 



178 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

literary and commercial. It often unfits its recipients 
for the positions open to them, making them scorn 
the labor of their hands and seek to support them- 
selves by their wits. Such education simply intensi- 
fies the social problem, instead of solving it. It 
tends to produce superficial and conceited men and 
women instead of self-supporting and substantial 
members of society. The great need of our public 
school system is the introduction of industrialism 
into its programme of development. The State cer- 
tainly has an interest and a duty in educating those 
who cannot be otherwise educated : the orphan, the 
waif, the outcast, the pauper ; it may be expedient 
also for those otherwise circumstanced to be intrusted 
to the public schools, but the whole system needs to 
be reconstructed upon a true conception of the life 
of citizens. 

(2) The completion of education must be assumed 
by the family and the Church. This division and 
specialization of labor is not out of harmony with 
a true development and is not impracticable. The 
incapacity of the State to teach religion does not 
disqualify it to do good service in its own sphere of 
secular helpfulness. As Bishop Harris has wisely 
said : " If the facts were known it would probably be 
found that in the proper work of the school there is 
hardly any Christian instruction possible, and that 
what is given could be better and more efficiently 
given by the pastor and the parents, in the Church 
and in the home. It should not be forgotten that 
Christianity is not a philosophy. It has no peculiar 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 



179 



system of thought or summary of knowledge. It 
does not profess to teach a peculiar astronomy, or 
geology, or cosmogony, or ontology, however mis- 
takenly or persistently such a claim has been made 
for it. Nay, it is now well seen that however valu- 
able dogmas and creeds are and shall be, yet Chris- 
tianity is not merely a set of dogmas, or creed of 
opinions, but is a faith, a life. It does its best work, 
not by dogmatic teaching, not by propounding theo- 
ries, but by touching the heart, arousing the con- 
science, awakening the spirit to the unseen realities 
above it and the immortal dignities before it ; by 
giving to the disciple love to be the moral motive- 
power of his life, and by training him to walk with 
his unseen Guide and King. And this it does, not 
necessarily by invading the schoolroom and inaugu- 
rating a special propagandism there, but rather by 
shedding its radiance over the life of the child, by 
sanctifying his sabbaths, by the sweet and gentle 
ministries of the fireside and family circle, by the 
simple and loving methods of Christian nurture in 
the Church, the Sunday-school, the home. To be 
a Christian does not depend upon the amount or kind 
of philosophy or scientific knowledge we acquire, 
nor upon the intellectual training and discipline we 
undergo ; but it depends upon the power of our faith, 
the completeness of our trust, the entireness of our 
self-surrender to the guidance of Christ and the Holy 
Spirit. Let the home-training of the child, then, be 
all that it should be ; let his religious discipline be 
carefully looked after, according to the Church's plan 



l8o SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

. . . and the question of religious teaching in the 
school will become comparatively unimportant. The 
real trouble is the neglect of religious education out 
of the school, rather than within it. It is the godless 
home and the indifferent, or formal, or unspiritual 
Church, rather than the secular school, that are 
dwarfing the religious life of this generation." 24 

3. The spirit of our laws does not prohibit a Chris- 
tian teacher from imparting the color of his mind 
and life to those who are his pupils. The prohibition 
of religious teaching outside of the formal instructions 
of the school cannot be logically maintained. Con- 
sider for a moment what teachers are permitted to 
do without restriction. They assume to communi- 
cate to the child what they believe to be true, with- 
out regard to the parent's opinions. They inculcate 
views on the injurious effects of alcohol which many 
parents, as manufacturers, venders, and consumers 
of intoxicants, do not approve ; they teach a morality 
which parents do not embody in their conduct or 
consider as established science ; they proclaim eco- 
nomical principles which fathers do not always 
accept as true, and sometimes regard as false, perni- 
cious, and destructive of their interests. The State 
goes farther. It sometimes makes education compul- 
sory. It reaches out its omnipotent arm, takes out 
of the family a child upon whom a parent's heart is 
set, places him in a school under social, philosophical, 
and moral influences which his father may not ap- 

24 The Relation of Christianity to Civil Society (the Bohlen Lectures for 
1882), by Bishop Samuel S. Harris, D.D., LL.D., lecture iv. 



CHRISTIANIT Y AND ED UCA TION. 1 8 I 

prove, and sends him home full of new and strange 
ideas to pronounce judgment upon the sentiments 
and principles of the parent who has given him his 
life and supplies his bodily wants. Can the State do 
all this and exclude religious influence because it is 
religious ? Can the State with any show of reason 
adopt texts filled with the names of Greek and Roman 
deities, require the pupil to learn them and the attri- 
butes assigned to them, and then reject a text because 
it contains an Anglo-Saxon name for the Deity? 
Can it require tuition about innumerable gods in 
whom no one believes, the excuse being that no one 
does believe in them, and repudiate all instruction 
about the one God in whom nearly all believe, on the 
ground that they do believe in Him ? I cannot 
understand how the Bible, read without comment, 
can be excluded from a public school, or how the 
voice of a teacher can be silenced when he expresses 
his personal religious convictions. The State can- 
not teach religion, but how can it prevent a free man 
from expressing his convictions ? There is more 
effect of beer than of logic in that Milwaukee dog- 
matism that fines a teacher for uttering sentiments 
about God and the soul, but permits him to teach 
the atomic evolution of the world and that mind is 
merely a function of the brain. 

Christianity is happily not dependent upon the 
agency of the secular school for its extension. It is 
probably well for the development of our national life 
that the schools are beyond ecclesiastical control. 
The distinctively clerical influence is conservative, 



1 82 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

rather than progressive, regarding moral wellbeing 
rather than intellectual advancement. Such, at least, 
is the testimony of history. And yet it is possible 
for the secularization of the school to go too far. 
The State is assuming a wholly new position in exclud- 
ing religious influences from the schoolroom. Why 
not let them enjoy the same freedom that other 
influences do ? Political sectarianism would doubt- 
less be as obnoxious to partisans as religious sectari- 
anism can be to any, yet we hear the claim constantly 
pressed that political science shall be taught in our 
schools. To exclude on the ground of religion a 
book or an influence or an exercise from a school 
seems to me beyond the scope of the State's proper 
authority. It is persecution of religion because it is 
religion. 

The Christian men of this nation will be very weak 
indeed if they do not insist that the Christian Scrip- 
tures and Christian teachers be everywhere accorded 
the privilege of exposition and utterance. Christian 
duty binds every disciple of Christ to let the light 
within him shine upon all around him, most of all 
upon those whose unshaped lives are submitted to his 
molding hand. No Christian can desire that our 
public schools shall be converted into propagandas of 
a sectarian or dogmatic type. But it may be fairly 
asked that the influence of Jesus might have its place 
among the shaping forces ; that the young might be 
taught the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of 
men; that veracity, reverence, justice, and charity 
might be inculcated ; that the conceit of the young 



CHRISTIANITY AND EDUCATION. 1 83 

might be tempered with some respect for the wisdom 
and goodness of the world's great men, including 
those mentioned in the Bible ; that the arithmetical 
consciousness which intensifies the selfishness of our 
age might be touched with some consideration for 
the rights of others ; that the perception of present 
interests might be accompanied with some realization 
of permanent and spiritual needs ; that rights and 
duties might be explained in the light of a personal 
authority that would give them force in a child's 
mind ; that the religious sentiments might find exer- 
cise in some simple and elementary but purely volun- 
tary form of worship that would at least preserve the 
rudimentary instincts with which men are naturally 
endowed. Religion within such limits may have 
place in our public schools without violating any 
principle of our American conception of the State. 
The rights of the small number of imported atheists, 
agnostics, and positivists who would oppose such a 
plan need not be seriously affected. Their offspring 
might be marked with a designating badge and kept 
carefully away from all such influence f Upon such 
a programme Christians of every name might easily 
unite: and how, in such an atmosphere, would preju- 
dice and sectarianism soften and dissolve, a general 
fellowship in high objects of faith drawing the coming 
generations together in the sense of a common 
brotherhood, leaving free for each the ever-diminish- 
ing differences of personal opinion, while preserving 
"the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." 



VII. 

CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS 
OF LEGISLATION. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
LEGISLATION. 



I. THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO THE 
STATE. 

1 . Christianity has no Alliance with Civil Power. 

2. Gladstone's Argument for a State Religion. 

3. The Fruits of State Religions. 

4. Ethical and Doctrinal Failure of State Religions. 

5. The Christian Doctrine of Personality. 

6. The Public Functions of Christian Ministers. 

II. LAW AS A SOCIAL FACTOR. 

1 . The Nature of a Civil Law. 

2. Law as a Moral Influence. 

3. The Limitation of Legal Influence. 

4. The Origin and Authority of Law. 

5. The Purpose of Law. 

6. The Contrast of Law and Morality. 

7. Theories of the Functions of the State : 

( 1 ) The Theocratic Theory ; 
( 2 ) The Paternal Theory ; 

(3) The Police Theory; 

(4) The National Theory. 

III. THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEGISLATION. 

1 . The Element of Personality in Modern Law. 

2. Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Contract. 

3. The Moral Consciousness as Court of Appeal. 

4. Christianity the Molder of the Moral Consciousness. 



VII. 

CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
LEGISLATION. 

I. 

i. It would be superfluous for me in this presence 
to recount the history of Christianity in relation to 
the civil law, or to enumerate the theories that have 
been held concerning that relation. It is evident that 
Christianity itself disclaims and repudiates any such 
relation whatever, except in so far as personal pro- 
tection is demanded for Christian men in the exer- 
cise of their natural and spiritual rights. " My king- 
dom is not of this world," said Christ, and no crown 
of temporal sovereignty was ever claimed by him. 
Paul made no higher demand of the empire which 
finally adopted the cross as its symbol than mere 
recognition and protection as a Roman citizen. 

2. It is the State rather than the Church that has 
derived advantage from the historic union of the two. 
From a philosophic point of view it is not difficult to 
show some reason for the alliance of legislative with 
ecclesiastical power. One of the most illustrious of 
modern statesmen, Mr. Gladstone, says : " Religion 
is applicable to a state because it is the office of the 
State, in its personality, to evolve the social life of 
man, which social life is essentially moral in the ends 



1 88 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

it contemplates, in the subject-matter on which it 
feeds, and in the restraints and motives it requires ; 
and which can only be effectually moral when it is 
religious." 1 There are two assumptions here which 
are certainly open to question. The first is the 
attribution of "personality" to the State, which we 
have formerly discussed in treating of Dr. Mulford's 
idea of the nation as a " moral person," and found 
it to be a fanciful diversion of metaphysics. The 
second assumption is that the State evolves the 
social life of man in the moral order, which implies 
that the individual life is morally ordered by public 
authority ; a proposition which, however it may be 
regarded in England, must provoke a smile in the 
United States. But the final objection to Mr. Glad- 
stone's argument for a state religion is the very fact 
which he adduces in favor of it : that the " social life 
of man is essentially moral in the ends it contemplates, 
in the subject-matter on which it feeds, and in the 
restraints and motives it requires." The " restraints " 
and "motives" offered by the State are not moral, 
but compulsory. It is precisely because much of 
the social life of man is moral that it cannot be 
wholly regulated by the State. 

3. Before discussing the nature of legislation and 
the problems with which it deals, let us see how a 
state religion has affected that "social life of man " 
which Mr. Gladstone says is " essentially moral." 
The union of Church and State has led to terrible 
religious wars, which would never have happened but 

1 Quoted in Woolsey's Political Science, vol. ii. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 1 89 

for the alliance of religion with political power, as 
the wars with the Albigenses, the Hussite War, the 
Thirty Years' War, and the English Rebellion. It 
has forced compliance with offensive ritual and cere- 
mony, destroying personal independence, provoking 
hypocrisy, and punishing with imprisonment and 
death sincere recalcitrants. It has shut out from 
the English parliament men of great ability and 
patriotism because they were disqualified for taking 
the communion of the Established Church. For 
centuries it excluded all dissenters from the privi- 
leges of the universities. It has intensified social 
rancor and directed obliquy against a sincere and 
spiritually minded class. It has trammeled thought 
and deadened spirituality by binding the clergy to 
political favor. It has prevented intermarriage on 
grounds that were ridiculous. It has caused prose- 
cutions and persecutions innumerable, and made the 
"spiritual lords " the sport of the serious. 

4. Besides these fruits there has been a failure 
to accomplish the results intended. An established 
religion has usually neglected the poor, for whose 
"social life" alone it could be justified, in order to 
court the rich. It has failed to suppress or even 
retard the growth of unbelief, and the countries 
where it exists are precisely those where skepticism 
has grown most rapidly and is the strongest. Nor 
has it secured discipline and purity, either doctrinal 
or practical, even among communicants. Finally, 
the best attainments of the state churches them- 
selves are prompted by voluntary, rather than legal, 



I9O SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

action, as in the sums subscribed for missions. Such 
are the comments of history upon the doctrine that 
it is " the office of the State, in its personality, to 
evolve the social life of man." False in theory, it 
has proved false in practice, and commends itself to 
no one so naturally as to a prime minister, in whom 
the State's " personality " becomes self-conscious. 

5. Christianity places responsibility for social pro- 
gress where alone power to achieve it may be found 
— -in the actual individual persons who constitute the 
State, not in the State itself, endowed with an imagi- 
nary "personality" as powerless in action as it is 
baseless in thought. What Christianity demands is 
that each one of those living and responsible persons 
shall be made to feel that he is one, and that he shall 
be protected in his inalienable rights of thought and 
conscience, sheltered under the mighty sword of the 
civil power, which shall fall upon no man to compel, 
but only to defend. The mission of Christianity to 
mankind is not to force, but to win ; not to drive, but 
to draw; not to render masses of men mechanically 
virtuous, but to render every soul vitally spiritual. 
The attitude of Christ toward all legislation is shown 
in his treatment of the Mosaic law. He pointed to 
himself as its personal fulfilment, and reduced its 
complex code to one essential principle. Love and 
personality are Christ's two leading ideas, so far as 
his life-giving power over men is a matter of ideas 
at all. Love, crowning and perfecting personality ; 
personality, culminating in love, — these are the 
fountains of all Christian thought and of all Christian 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 



I 9 I 



practice. The perfect love in the perfect person — 
this is the incarnation toward which creation centred 
and from which redemption radiates. 

But Christianity is not an antinomian influence 
either in the moral or the political spheres. Person- 
ality is the only foundation upon which either moral 
or civil law can be based. Deny it, and laws of every 
kind are mere arbitrary rules of expediency. The 
aim of law is the definition of rights. Rights arise 
from personality. Only persons can have rights. 
Love seeks the wellbeing of its object. That well- 
being is attained, with respect to human persons, only 
when each one has his rights. Love, therefore, is 
realized only in the light of law. It is for this 
reason that Christ sums up the law as consisting 
finally in love, which is the "fulfilling of the law." 

6. How, then, is Christianity related to human 
legislation, to the framing of civil laws ? It holds 
steadily before the eyes of men a truth which they 
have so often forgotten — the dignity of man. 
Through its prophets, the ministers of Christ, it 
ever voices forth this fundamental doctrine, that 
man, every man, is by nature a moral being, a person 
with inalienable rights, and bound by correlative 
duties. Upon this foundation of a community of 
nature it erects that other truth, that every man should 
love his neighbor as himself. Lineal successors, not 
of the priests of the Jewish dispensation, but of the 
"goodly fellowship " of the glorious Hebrew prophets, 
the ministers of Christ find it a part of their vocation 
to denounce wrong, to explain right, to enlighten and 



192 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



quicken the conscience, and thus to lead the people 
to the realization of duty. Let them see to it that 
they magnify their calling, avoiding the perils of par- 
tisan entanglement and alliance with political dema- 
gogues, pressing fearlessly home upon the people the 
principles of Christ that underlie our Republican 
Constitution and have accomplished the fulfilment 
of that prophecy of our Lord, " The truth shall make 
you free." 

Not, then, by the dictation of statutes, not by 
forcing its creed or even its morality upon the people, 
would Christianity extend its influence in the world. 
To deny or restrict those rights of thought and con- 
science which it assumes as the cardinal elements of 
its doctrine would be a suicidal act. Maintaining his 
own right to representation in the making of laws, 
and seeing in those laws inherent limitations as 
affecting personal liberty, a Christian man must 
not only grant but strive to secure to every other 
man the equal recognition of his right. 

II. 

Having outlined the spirit of Christianity toward 
legislation, let us now briefly consider law as a social 
factor. 

I. " A law," says a distinguished writer on jurispru- 
dence, " is a command proceeding from the supreme 
political authority of a state and addressed to the 
persons who are the subjects of that authority." 2 In 
a state like our American republic, the " supreme 

2 Sheldon Amos's Science of Law, chap. iv. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 1 93 

political authority " is a legislature, state or national, 
chosen by the suffrages of the adult male population 
in whom political sovereignty is assumed to reside. 
We therefore consider ourselves a " self-governed " 
people, being subjects and sovereigns at once. 
Nothing would seem at the first glance more easy 
than the realization of any ideal which the majority 
might entertain, by the simple process of legislation. 
2. That law is a potent social factor in human life, 
limiting and shaping the activity of all, cannot be 
denied. A moral constitution of society is, doubtless, 
anterior to a legal one. It is the source out of which 
law originates ; and yet, as Sheldon Amos says : 
"Apart from the strength, coherence, and perma- 
nence imparted by law and government, the most 
hopeful moral growths are too frail and feeble to 
endure, still less to come to maturity." 3 Law reacts 
upon the people as a pledge to abstinence does upon 
an inebriate. It creates a standard by which each 
one judges himself, even though he may not attain to 
its requirements. " So soon as a law is made and lifted 
out of the region of controversy, it begins to exercise 
a moral influence which is no less intense and wide- 
spreading for being almost imperceptible. Though 
law can never attempt to forbid all that is morally 
wrong, yet that comes to be held to be wrong which 
the law forbids." 4 When once enacted, the people 
not only obey a law which they have opposed, but 
"by a peculiar action of the imagination they will 

3 Amos, op. cit. preface. 
1 Amos, op. cit. chap. xiii. 



i 9 4 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



unconsciously attribute to it a quasi-mysterious origin 
and banish all memory of the competing views of 
expediency amidst which it arose." Because of this 
confessed power of law over life, men are inclined to 
look to legislation for the panacea of all social ills. 

3. But the ameliorating influence of law is not 
without limitation. There is ample room for the 
persistence of evil when law has done its utmost 
to define rights and to cover them with its protection. 
" A man may be a bad husband, a bad father, a bad 
guardian, without coming into conflict with the rules 
of a single law. He may be an extortionate landlord, 
a wasteful tenant, a hard dealer, an unreliable trades- 
man, and yet the legal machinery of the country be 
quite powerless to stimulate or to chastise him. He 
may be, furthermore, a self-seeking politician, an 
unscrupulous demagogue, or an indolent aristocrat, 
and yet satisfy to the utmost the claims of the law 
upon him. Nevertheless, it is just in the conduct of 
these several relationships that the bulk of human 
life consists and on them that national prosperity and 
honor depend." 5 

4. The reason of the impotency of law to rectify 
all human ills arising from personal action will 
appear, if we consider the origin of law and what it 
is that gives it authority. Civil law has two distinct 
sources. The first is unconscious custom, which 
slowly comes to have the force of law in regulating 
conduct and at last obtains conscious recognition. 
The second is legislative enactment. It is upon this 

s Amos, op. cit. chap. iii. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 



195 



that hope rests in the minds of those who expect 
legislation to reconstruct and perfect human society. 
But they fail to estimate its precise origin and value. 
Even in our representative republic, law is not always, 
as theory would lead us to suppose it must be, the 
expression of the popular will. It is often dictated by 
powerful corporations, sometimes by single individ- 
uals, usually by the interests of the legislators or a 
class of their constituents, seldom by a majority of 
the best qualified electors, and never by the whole 
people. 

Law is always born amid the pains of controversy 
and is the child of compromise. It almost never 
embodies the results of pure reason or the highest 
morality. It affords security for such rights as can 
probably be enforced and aims at such justice as it is 
expedient to seek. Considered in its totality, it is 
simply the expression of the character of the people 
as a whole, representing what they permit as much as 
what they desire. Whether originating in custom or 
enactment, it is seldom better, *and is sometimes 
worse, than the average of the personal wills whose 
command it purports to be. 

The effectiveness of a law is limited by the condi- 
tions of its origin. If, by some fortuity, a law is 
beyond the ability of the average man to observe, it 
becomes nugatory both in its interpretation and its 
execution. While the legislator is supposed to regard 
the wellbeing of the people as a whole, the judge 
and the executive observe the effect of the law upon 
the individual in concrete cases. Accordingly, the 



I96 SO CI AT INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

judge interprets the law and the executive applies it 
with more regard to the personal conditions of its 
enforcement. Hence a really bad law either quietly 
becomes a dead letter, or is soon repealed by a special 
revolt of the governed. 

5. We obtain a new view of the nature of law, if 
we consider its purpose. It assumes the existence of 
intelligent and self-determined beings, who possess 
rights and at the same time are likely to invade one 
another's rights. Without law there would be the 
absolute rule of the stronger and the oppression of 
the weaker. It aims to prevent this collision and to 
confine each social unit to the sphere of his rights. 
It would preserve all by restraining each. To this 
end it defines rights and affixes a penalty to their 
violation sufficient to prevent their invasion. It first 
creates a government to serve as the organ of its 
commands, and defines the sphere and functions of 
the government in a constitution. It then issues 
commands for the preservation of the government 
itself, the freedom of the persons who constitute the 
State, and the perpetuity of the institutions necessary 
to the life of the State, such as the family, property, 
and contract. 

With such a purpose, it is evident that law has 
limits as touching human conduct. It deals only 
with acts, not with motives ; with relations between 
men, not with the life of individuals. It does not 
presume to say how fully any man shall realize his 
own rights, but simply that he shall not invade the 
rights of others. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION 



197 



6. There is clearly not only a distinction but a 
perfect contrast between civil law and morality. Law 
appeals for its enforcement to external compulsion, 
morality to the conscience and the dignity of moral 
freedom. Law terrifies and makes men afraid, moral- 
ity emboldens and makes men brave ; law assumes 
that selfishness is the governing principle of life, 
morality that justice is more authoritative than self- 
love ; law formulates distinct propositions and precepts 
whose letter must be obeyed, morality avoids verbal 
rules and stereotyped maxims, putting love in the place 
of prohibitions ; law regards the overt act, morality 
the intent of the heart ; law estimates rectitude by the 
non-violation of its prohibitions, morality by the posi- 
tive character and actions of the man. Clearly, it is 
not the purpose of law to codify morality, and moral- 
ity cannot expect universal dominion through the 
operation of law. If we trace law and morality in 
their specific applications, we still more distinctly 
perceive their antithesis. " Law, indeed," says Amos, 
"marks out the limits of the family and provides 
general remedies for the grosser violations of its 
integrity. But it can go, and does go, a very little 
way toward making good husbands and wives, fathers 
and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. 
Law can create and define the relations of landlord 
and tenant, farmer and laborer ; but it is well known 
how little it can do directly to guide landlords in the 
rent they morally ought to exact, or the compensation 
for improvements made by an outgoing tenant which 
they ought to allow, or to compel farmers to remun- 



I98 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

erate their laborers, build cottages for them, and exact 
work from them in the way least likely to render 
them paupers in their old age. So with contract. 
The operations of the market must meet with some 
other stimulus and guide than legal rules, if men are 
to be scrupulously honest in keeping engagements, in 
selling pure and unadulterated goods, in laying bare 
all the hidden vices of the things for which they are 
endeavoring to find customers. Law can do none of 
these things directly. Indeed, by trying to do them 
directly, it may only weaken that force of morality 
which alone is equal to the task." 6 

7. Various theories have been held concerning the 
functions of the State as a moral agency, and these 
we shall briefly notice. 

(1) The theocratic theory assumes that the State is 
founded upon a moral and religious basis and, there- 
fore, clothes the government with moral and religious 
authority. This blending of political and religious 
power has been almost universal in the great historic 
nations. The priest has usually been the counselor of 
the ruler, and often the ruler has united the political 
and spiritual headship of the nation in his own person. 
Law has fortified itself in the consciences of men by 
invoking the sanction of morality and religion, aided 
by the ceremonials of the prevailing faith, returning 
for this service the protection and compulsion of 
political power in the enforcement of morals and 
religious creeds. There are three traits of this con- 
ception of the State which unfit it for the modern 

• Amos, op. cit, chap, iii. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 1 99 

mind: (1) It exalts the political authority to a 
superhuman height, rendering it absolute and declar- 
ing it infallible, while the individual conscience and 
reason are repressed and silenced. (2) It emascu- 
lates the powers of progress by assuming the posses- 
sion of a final perfection, admitting of no criticism, 
experiment, or spontaneity. (3) It is harsh and cruel 
in its judgments, claiming a divine right of retribution 
in its punishments, exercising an infinite jurisdiction 
over life with a finite comprehension of its facts and 
principles. A true theocracy once existed upon the 
earth, but it soon lapsed into a false one. So long as 
the Jews retained the theocratic constitution of Moses, 
they prospered even amidst adversity ; but they 
adopted a monarchy with theocratic pretensions and 
suffered the consequences of their apostasy. 

(2) The paternal theory is a residuum of the mon- 
archical regime. A good king is, indeed, in a certain 
sense "the father of his people." He has their well- 
being near his heart and ever in his mind. In a 
kingdom or empire, the analogy of a family is not an 
unnatural one. But how shall we apply this concep- 
tion to a republic? Are the "sovereign people" 
children? Who is the "father of the people"? A 
father of a family is the agent upon whom the happi- 
ness of his children largely depends and he is in a 
measure responsible for it. A republican State does 
not hold in its hand the happiness of the people 
and is not accountable for it. Bluntschli says : " The 
happiness of men is, for the most part, independent of 
the State. Even most of the material goods on which 



200 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

human welfare is dependent, dwellings, food, clothing, 
and income, are acquired, not through the State, but 
by the labor and saving of individuals. Still more is 
this true of the spiritual goods, on which the ideal 
wealth and happiness of mankind are founded. It is 
not the State which endows men with their talents 
and capacities ; these are gifts of nature, and they 
differ in individual cases instead of being common to 
all. The State can confer on no one the delights of 
friendship and love, the charm of scientific study, or 
of poetical and artistic creation, the consolations of 
religion, or the purity and sanctification of the soul 
united with God." 7 

(3) The police theory would limit the purpose of 
the State to the realization of personal liberty in the 
enjoyment of natural rights. Its sole end is said 
to be justice. It assumes that each man can best 
pursue and secure his own happiness, if he is per- 
mitted to use without restraint or interference such 
powers as he may possess for the accomplishment of 
his own freely chosen ends. Law, as regarded by 
this theory, is simply a necessary evil, a protection 
offered to the well-disposed against the rapacity and 
injustice of the ill-disposed. There is, doubtless, 
much of truth in this doctrine, but it fails to formu- 
late the whole. While morality and happiness include 
too much for the State to realize, because both 
depend largely upon conditions of mind and heart 
which the State cannot reach or control, justice alone 
includes too little. This circumscription of the func- 

7 Bluntschli, Allgemeine Staatslehre, 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 201 

tions of the State wholly overlooks the interests of 
the people as a whole. Even admitting that the 
nation is nothing, apart from the individuals who 
compose it, there are material and intellectual needs 
which individuals, as such, cannot supply, and not very 
effectually by voluntary incorporation. Roads, canals, 
bridges, statistical bureaus, explorations, general de- 
fence, and many other things are for the benefit of all, 
yet would not be privately undertaken by any. The 
police theory of the State fails to grasp the concep- 
tion of national life and to realize the existence of 
public rights and duties. Itself a reaction against 
the paternalism of the eighteenth century, it has pro- 
voked a reaction against its own narrowness that is 
destined to efface it from the public mind. 

(4) The national theory avoids on the one hand 
the identification of law with morality, which too 
much extends the sphere of political action ; and 
on the other, the restriction of law to the mere 
protection of rights, which too much contracts it. 
There are for every people a possible development 
and perfection of capacities that can be realized 
only in a national life. This includes the encourage- 
ment of morality and the protection of rights, but 
involves much more. As the life-task of an individ- 
ual is to develop his personal powers, so the life-task 
of a nation is to develop the national resources. 
This does not include responsibility for the personal 
welfare of all the members of the State. To care 
for all is impossible unless the State becomes an 
omniscient providence, watching over the citizens 



202 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

with a paternal solicitude. No representative gov- 
ernment possesses this attribute, and none can be 
expected to fill the role of father to all the political 
prodigals. Nor is this necessary to the development 
of the national life. To establish, maintain, and 
perfect such institutions and such enterprises as the 
prosperity of the nation requires — such is the duty 
of the State. Resolved into its lowest terms, this 
is simply the care of all the citizens for the welfare 
of the whole. This is possible, for every citizen 
may be and ought to be interested in the welfare of 
the whole nation. To reverse the statement, to say 
that the State, the abstract and impersonal whole, 
should be responsible for the happiness of its con- 
crete and personal citizens, is an empty and impossi- 
ble proposition. We cannot look to the State for 
our wellbeing ; we must ourselves secure the well- 
being of the State. If we say that a part of the 
sovereign people may look to another part for their 
welfare ; that, for example, the poor may so look to 
the rich, we forget the co-equal sovereignty on which 
a representative republic is built, and assign a differ- 
ence of rights and duties which implies a distinction 
of social classes. If men are politically equal, a 
part cannot be the political wards of another part. 
As soon as a dependent class appears sovereignty 
vanishes from that class. A " sovereign cannot take 
tips," cannot ask for pourboire, without degradation. 8 
The citizens of a representative republic must secure 

8 Elaborated by W. G. Sumner, What Social Classes owe to Each Other, 
chap. ii. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 



203 



by their strength and wisdom the prosperity of the 
nation ; not gather, like helpless children, about the 
knees of a parent, asking for bread. In the civil 
order there is no " father " to meet the " prodigal " 
on the way ; and to kill the "fatted calf" is to rob 
the industrious brother. When a people imagine 
such a father in a king, they preface their petition 
with the scriptural acknowledgment : " Let me be 
as one of thy hired servants, for I am no more 
worthy to be called thy son." For a citizen to 
receive aid from the State, except for actual service 
rendered, is an abdication of sovereignty. 

There are two provinces of human life which 
legislation alone can never really ameliorate. The 
first of these is the moral and spiritual life of the 
soul. The law may, indeed, control outward actions, 
forcing external compliance with codes and creeds, 
but it cannot produce that internal consecration to 
lofty purpose or ennobling faith in which all true 
morality and religion essentially consist. The other 
is the production of wealth. Law is not creative. 
It regulates and conserves, but it does not produce. 
It may maintain conditions favorable to the creation 
of wealth, by offering protection to all who put forth 
productive energies, but it is upon the use of these 
by the productive agents themselves that all wealth- 
creation depends. Law may, by its restrictions, 
cripple and paralyze the industrial energies. It may 
also redistribute wealth. It may authorize the issue 
of debased money, it may initiate the creation of 
public works, it may grant pensions and subsidies 



204 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



to classes of persons, it may even invade the rela- 
tions of employer and employed and control the 
division of products ; but these actions do not in- 
crease wealth, they simply transfer it. The two 
strong political fanaticisms of our time are the 
beliefs that the State can make men good, and that 
the State can make men rich. Both are pernicious, 
because they are false and because they would carry 
their falsehood into the field of practice. 

III. 

i. When we consider that so much of human leg- 
islation has been designed to compel men to save 
their souls by accepting a state religion and to make 
favored classes rich and powerful at the expense of 
others, it is not difficult to understand Buckle's 
opinion that the only progress made in human legis- 
lation during the last five hundred years has been 
made through repealing laws. 9 Freedom of conscience 
and freedom of contract are the two great legal 
advances in the history of the world. Both are, in a 
sense, the triumphs of Christianity, and are simple 
deductions from its idea of personality. I do not 
affirm that the idea of personality was unknown to 
the Roman law, for it was the central idea in that 
majestic system; but it was a legal abstraction, as 
much so as the artificial persons, or corporations, 
which that law recognized. It was Christianity that 
filled this abstract form with vital ethical contents. 
Roman law saw a person in a citizen, but none in a 

9 Buckle's History of Civilization, vol. i, chap. v. 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 205 

slave, a child, or a woman. Christianity at once 
changed this conception and has reconstructed legis- 
lation by its doctrine of the human soul. 

2. It seems to me that the interest of Christianity 
lies in the legal maintenance of these two principles : 
freedom of conscience and freedom of contract. It 
will doubtless require brave and vigilant men to 
defend them, as it has to win them, for humanity. 

But there are limits to personal freedom, because 
the freedom of one may invade the freedom of 
another. Are men to speak and act without restraint ? 
That would be anarchy. If men were to propose and 
advocate the erection of temples to Aphrodite and to 
revive her impure»worship, on the pretext of religious 
faith and ceremonial, would it be disregarding the 
freedom of conscience to prohibit them ? If others 
were to employ children to labor for a pittance at 
unhealthy toil and for unnatural hours, would it be a 
violation of the freedom of contract to forbid them ? 
The real problem of legislation is to find the circum- 
ference of personal rights that surrounds each person 
and to draw the line of prohibition there. 

When we make laws to suppress the publication of 
obscene books and pictures, it is because the young 
and susceptible have rights as well as writers and 
publishers. When we desire rigid divorce legislation, 
it is because helpless women and innocent children 
have rights as well as sensual men. When the legal 
regulation of the manufacture and sale of intoxicants 
is proposed, it is because wives and children and 
fathers and mothers and taxpayers have rights as 
well as brewers and distillers and dealers. 



206 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

3. It is not my purpose to attempt the solution 
of these practical problems of legislation, so delicate 
and difficult as to tax the powers of the most expert 
statesmen; to judge between " overlegislation " and 
" laissez j 'aire run mad;" to discuss the respective 
merits of "prohibition" and "high license;" or to 
finish in a paragraph the work of a generation. 
These are problems that will ultimately find their 
solution in the moral consciousness of a great people, 
coming again and again to their discussion with ever- 
enlarging experience and ever-increased wisdom. 
The important consideration is that it is in the moral 
consciousness of the people that the solution will be 
found at last. 

• An ancient Chinese legend runs : " The three great 
religious teachers of the Celestial Empire, from their 
heavenly abode beholding with profound sorrow the 
degeneracy of their people, and mourning that their 
lifework seemed so entire a failure, returned to the 
earth in order to find some suitable missionary whom 
they could send forth as a reformer. They came in 
their wanderings to an old man sitting as a guardian 
of a fountain. He talked to them so wisely and so 
earnestly of the great concerns which they had most 
at heart, that they came to the conclusion that he was 
the very man for the work which they wished to 
accomplish. But when they proposed the mission to 
him, he replied : ' It is the upper part of me only that 
is of flesh and blood ; the lower part is of stone. I 
can talk about virtue and good works, but I cannot 
rise from my seat to perform any righteous acts.'" 



CHRISTIANITY AND LEGISLATION. 20"J 

The apologue well pictures human legislation, which 
can discuss virtue but cannot enforce it. Powerless 
to realize its own ideals, it needs the animation of a 
superior life to impart activity. It requires the cure 
of its moral petrifaction and awaits the words of the 
divine Master : " Rise and follow me." 

4. The most powerful tonic influence felt by the 
moral consciousness of mankind to-day is the religion 
of Christ. Wherever its hopes and conceptions pen- 
etrate, a moral change speedily follows. Wherever 
they are temporarily or partially repudiated, there is 
retrogression. While Christianity does not demand 
incorporation in the State as an established religion, 
and does not claim to dictate the specific laws that 
shall govern men, it does create the spirit out of 
which better laws proceed. We are slowly shaping 
on this continent a people who love law, because it is 
their will to obey it, and who, with power to destroy 
it, are united to preserve it. For a Christian people, 
lawmaking is the definition of rights whose reality 
and sacredness are based upon the exalted conception 
of a person who is at once the brother of Christ and 
the son of God. Let this conception suffer a collapse 
into a materialistic or dynamic one, devoid of spiritual 
content, and we shall find legislation reduced to a 
mere conflict of interests and dominated at last by 
mere brute power. Our representative republic of 
self-governed persons is the wonder of the world and 
the paradox of prophecy. Its vital secret is the 
Christian conception of man that is assumed in its 
Constitution and legislation. If ever that should 



208 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

change and cease to be the controlling idea of our 
national life, we should realize what it is so easy even 
for statesmen to forget, that the power of our Consti- 
tution is a moral power. The chief source of that 
power is in the religion of Jesus Christ, the ideals of 
which are creating a nation whose outer form shall be 
a republic of free men and whose inner life shall be 
the presence in the soul of God's coming kingdom. 



VIII. 

CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS 
OF REPRESSION. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
REPRESSION. 



I. THE RIGHT OF SOCIETY TO PUNISH. 
i. Two Theories of Punishment. 

2. Punishment is not ethically based on Retribution. 

3. Punishment is not ethically based on Utility. 

4. Punishment is ethically based on Repression. 

5. Effects of the Christian Conception of Punishment. 

II. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CRIME. 

1 . What is Crime ? 

2. The Law of Heredity. 

3. Idleness and Poverty. 

4. Ignorance, Literary and Industrial. 

5. Intemperance. 

6. Hopelessness. 

7. The Prevention and Cure of Crime. 

III. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 

1. Summary. 

2. Conclusion. 



VIII. 

CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
REPRESSION. 

I. 

A law is not simply a definition of rights ; it carries 
consequences to the law-breaker. Fine, imprison- 
ment, and death are the penalties attached to the 
violation of laws. Without such penalties laws would 
be as inoperative as a popular vote that all men should 
be virtuous. What right has a society of equals, 
through its government, to take from a man his 
money, his liberty, or his life, because he has not 
obeyed its commands ? 

i. Two opposite opinions have been held by high 
authorities in morals and jurisprudence. Says Im- 
manuel Kant : " If civil society should dissolve itself 
with the consent of all its members, the last murderer 
who should be found in prison ought first to be exe- 
cuted, in order that each might bear the penalty of 
his conduct and that the blood shed by him might 
not fall upon a people who had not inflicted that 
punishment." 1 This implies that society possesses a 
retributive function. Romagnosi, on the contrary, 
says : " If the right of punishment belongs to soci- 

1 Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgrtinde der Rechtslehre. 



2 12 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ety, it is only because of its effects upon the future." 2 
Punishment is here regarded as wholly preventive. 
The doctrine of retribution looks only to the past, 
that of prevention only to the future. Between them 
is a vast moral distance and the present is left wholly 
out of view. The one bases penalty upon the moral 
law and conceives society to be its executive. The 
other views punishment as required by social utility, 
without claiming a moral authority. Must we choose 
between this transcendentalism of Kant and this 
utilitarianism of Bentham ? 

2. I have already, in speaking of the relation be- 
tween religion and government, expressed dissent 
from the doctrine which regards the State as the 
agent of religion and morality. Protection to religion 
and morality the State should grant ; observance of 
them is beyond its power of enforcement. It cannot 
make men morally good. Even the infliction of penalty 
does not assume this. A murderer is no better for 
hanging. But does retributive power belong to civil 
law ? The moral law is for the conscience, its rebuke 
is addressed to the motive, its expiation is in remorse, 
its deliverance is in repentance. Note the contrast 
with human enactments. The penal law is for the 
protection of rights, its rebuke is addressed to the 
overt act, its expiation is in a series of sensations ; 
there is no deliverance until the sentence is fulfilled. 
In the view of moral law, confession is a step toward 

2 Romagnosi, Genese du Droit Penal, vol. i, chapitre xi. This is also the 
doctrine of Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legisla- 
tion, chap, xiii ; and of Beccaria, Traite des Delits et des Peines, ii. 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 213 

pardon ; in the view of penal law, confession dooms 
to punishment. Of moral guilt, no other person than 
the offender can be the judge ; of penal guilt another 
must judge. Because moral law and penal law are in 
most points different, and in some antithetical, penal 
judgment cannot be moral retribution. "Vengeance 
is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord," is a declara- 
tion that human punishment, whether individual or 
social, cannot claim a retributive element. The 
Creator has not delegated to man the difficult, the 
delicate, the impossible task of measuring and award- 
ing moral retribution. If he had, the penalty once 
paid, the sin would be expiated, and every released 
prisoner would be an innocent man. 

3. Will the theory that the right to punish arises 
from social utility bear examination ? It may be 
"useful" to society that all criminals of every grade, 
and paupers also, be carried out to sea and thrown 
overboard into its depths. The problems of crime 
and pauperism would thus cease to vex the public 
mind. Wherein does this solution fail ? It overlooks 
the fact that even criminals are persons, endowed 
with the rights of personality. Does social utility, 
then, meet with no limitation ? May society, to serve 
its own social needs, justly deprive men of property 
and liberty and life ? There is somewhere a limit to 
the authority of social utility. Utility has the same 
defect in justifying penalty that it has as a standard 
of moral conduct. It is incalculable, incapable of 
being a criterion. In the sphere of punishment, 
utility has a further difficulty. The government 



214 



SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 



practically identifies its own interest with the interest 
of society. In the name of " utility," the egoism of 
the State crushes out the freedom of the individual. 
A critic, an opponent, a recalcitrant, is naturally con- 
templated as an enemy, whose existence is prejudicial 
to the interest of the State. A democracy offers but 
little relief from this tendency to official outrage. 
The tyranny of a multitude is even more fierce and 
pitiless than the tyranny of one man. The interest 
of society, as conceived by itself, at one time prepares 
the guillotine for a Louis, at another, and sometimes 
soon, it prepares the same instrument for a Robes- 
pierre. If no good man had ever been a martyr to 
public utility, the emptiness of it as a justification 
of punishment might be less apparent ; but from 
Socrates to Christ, from Christ to Savonarola, from 
Savonarola to the latest victim of mob violence, the 
long line of martyrs rise to refute the maxim, " The 
voice of the people is the voice of God." Not for his 
own interest, not for society's interest, not for mere 
interest of any kind, may another justly take away 
my life. 

4. What, then, justifies the infliction of punish- 
ment ? Retribution assumes too much, utility, too 
little. The union of the two will possess no incre- 
ment of gain. And yet there is a basis, and it must 
be a motal basis, for this highest of social functions. 
So long as one of its members uses his powers for 
their natural ends, without interference with others, 
society cannot punish him for his sins or bend him to 
its fancied utilities. The frontier of my personality 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 2 I 5 

must be safe from invasion, or my right to cross the 
boundaries of another's right cannot be questioned. 
But the duty of society to protect rights carries with 
it the authority to repress the invasion of rights. The 
right of restraint, the right of commanding the peace, 
this is the moral basis of the right of society to 
punish. As Jourdan says : " So far as it supposes a 
superior judge and an infallible justice, the right of 
punishment does not exist ; human justice is not a 
delegation of divine justice ; it overleaps itself when 
it attempts to punish, it simply represses. The right 
to punish is simply the legitimate faculty of exercising 
upon that one who has violated right a restraint 
whose object is to impose on him respect for right 
by force ; it has its only and true foundation in the 
superior notion of right, without which society is only 
a material fact, destitute of all morality." 3 The 
supposition that God has delegated a retributive 
power to man is a tradition that has descended from 
that theocratic age when God was believed to govern 
through men directly, because he inspired their judg- 
ments and their acts. The idea that social utility 
justifies punishment is a subterfuge of that unethical 
and materialistic philosophy that has taxed its inge- 
nuity to justify the necessary processes of a moral 
order while theoretically denying the existence of 
moral beings. That human punishment is simply 
forcible restraint from wrong-doing is a moral con- 
ception that follows by logical necessity from the 
Christian idea of men as moral persons. The hand 

8 Jourdan, La Justice Criminelle en France, titre i, chapitre i. 



2l6 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

that inflicts injury must repair the injury; the life 
that destroys other life must surrender itself. If 
punishment were expiation, the hand that robbed 
would be a guiltless hand when it had restored ; the 
life that had slain its fellow-life would be stainless 
when the fatal drop had fallen from the scaffold. 
But the robber and the murderer have still their 
unsettled accounts with God. To be restrained from 
crime by a penalty that will henceforth destroy its 
motive in one's self, a criminal himself might feel is 
just; but it would fill one with the emotions of a 
martyr to hear the judge say, in the words once used 
to an English horse-thief : " You are sentenced to 
be hanged, not because you stole the horse, but in 
order to prevent others from stealing horses " ! 

5. It is the Christian conception of punishment, 
growing out of the Christian conception of person- 
ality, that has transformed the penal statutes of the 
civilized world and modified the whole treatment of 
criminals. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors administered 
an heroic justice. Besides death, fines, and flogging, 
mutilation was a common punishment ; men were 
branded on the forehead ; their hands, feet, and 
tongues were cut off ; and after the Danish invasion 
still more horrible mutilations were practised. For 
the greater offences eyes were plucked out ; the nose, 
ears, and lips were - cut off; the scalp was torn away; 
a female slave guilty of theft was burned alive ; and 
men were even flayed alive. One of Ethelred's stern 
statutes read : " Let the culprit be smitten till his 
neck break." Besides these horrors, too painful for 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 



217 



extended recital, the prison outrages against which 
John Howard directed his crusade were tender mer- 
cies. But now the whole picture of judicial bar- 
barity, with the debtor's prison, the whipping-post, 
and the other paraphernalia of savagery has ceased 
to haunt us as reality, and is but a gloomy chapter in 
the history of moral evolution. The pendulum has 
swung to the other side of its arc, and now that we 
have "those excellent model prisons which leave 
little to be desired in construction and in the comfort 
of the inmates, and many of which under humane 
rilanagement soften the rigors of imprisonment by 
means of libraries, entertaining lectures and readings, 
concerts, holidays, anniversary dinners, flowers, and 
marks for obedience to rules, which shorten the term 
of confinement," it is seriously asked : " Do these 
reformed prisons reform ? " They certainly do not 
annihilate crime, but they treat men and women like 
human beings, and thus in many cases doubtless give 
the first impressions that they are such which these 
unfortunates have ever received. If society can 
teach a portion of its culprits that the humanity they 
are required to respect is in them also, if it can create 
in them the Christian conception of personality by 
disclosing it within themselves, a great and fruitful 
advance has, no doubt, been made. If you take the 
criminal young enough, before he has become hard- 
ened, before impulse has settled into habit and habit 
has condensed into character, he is capable of refor- 
mation. The thirty-four reformatories in the United 
States have received nearly one hundred thousand 



2l8 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRLSTLANITY. 

boys and girls, and of these, three fourths, or about 
seventy thousand, are reported as reformed, at a cost 
of $150 each per annum. 

II. 

If crime is not an indestructible necessity, the 
question of its repression points to the study of its 
natural history. 

r. What is crime? Morality and legislation give 
different answers. For morality, what is a crime to- 
day is a crime forever. For legislation, the crime of 
yesterday may be the virtue of to-morrow. The law 
of God is unchangeable. The law of the State is 
variable. The reformer may be regarded as a crimi- 
nal by the State, but the heresy or treason which is 
punished as a crime to-day becomes the rallying-cry 
or the constitutional right of the next generation. 
On the other hand, the virtues of primitive man are 
the legal crimes of to-day. The craft and cruelty, 
the murder and plunder that made him a hero and a 
chief are now punishable crimes upon the statute- 
books of every civilized land. In the eye of the law 
that is a crime which the law prohibits, and nothing 
else is. But law aims to prohibit that which, in the 
estimation of each age, is an infringement of recog- 
nized rights. 

The first cause of crime is evidently an untrained 
animal instinct, the survival of a tendency to disre- 
gard rights and behave as if they were not. Whence 
comes this ? In one sense crime is simply action out 
of harmony with the environments, last century's 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 219 

practice running wild in this, an ancestral habit that 
persists in spite of social advancement. Pike, in his 
" History of Crime," gives this example : " Cruelty- 
is one of the most strongly marked characteristics 
of the savage. To inflict torture is one of his great- 
est delights. As soon as he makes a little progress 
his previous tendencies show themselves in the hor- 
rible ferocity of his punishments for criminals. In 
the course of ages man becomes gradually more mer- 
ciful. He ceases to mutilate, and even to torture, 
his fellows. He puts off his savage nature more and 
more, and learns to pride himself on his civilization ; 
he perceives that even the inferior animals may 
suffer ; and, as suffering has become associated with 
compassion, he extends his sympathy to all that 
feel." 4 At last we reach a point where even brutes 
are protected, some sympathetic Bergh leading legis- 
lation to the rescue of unhappy horses and canine 
waifs. " Naturalists of the modern school point out 
primitive organisms which still survive in their origi- 
nal form, though new species may have developed 
out of them. In the same manner there are savages 
still living among us of the same blood and origin as 
ourselves and yet unlike us in all except in our com- 
mon ancestry." 5 The idea that each individual lives 
over in rude outline the history of his race also finds 
application here. " The young human being, in the 
process of attaining the full maturity of his animal 
powers, has a strong tendency to exhibit in action 

* Pike's History of Crime in England, vol. ii, chap. xiii. 
Pike, op. cit. 



2 20 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

the lawless and cruel instincts of his savage ances- 
tors. A healthy boy has a pugnacity and a love of 
destruction which not uncommonly assume the form 
of cruelty. It is difficult to teach him honesty with 
respect to many things he covets. Just like the sav- 
age who has advanced one stage, he makes a slave 
of a younger or weaker boy. In him the partisan- 
ship of family, tribe, guild, or clan is intensely strong 
and, as he reaches adolescence, shows itself in such 
rough shapes as the apprentice riots of old in London, 
or the town and gown combats and ' rushes ' of mod- 
ern times at the universities." 6 

2. Thus the jurist as well as the theologian must 
take account of the great law of heredity that links 
us with the ancestral past and forces through our 
veins the dark current of sin that is not original with 
us, but flows from that primal fount which is sin's 
first original. And yet we must not empty the whole 
cup of guilt upon this stream of heredity. In his 
visit to that " cradle of crime," the home of the crimi- 
nal clan, the " Jukes," in New York State, Robert 
Dugdale discovered a nest of thieves, felons, and 
prostitutes, the picture of which produces a shudder 
in the mind of one who recalls it. 7 He has traced 
the growth of that family in a genealogical tree, 
whose roots reach back to the shameless Margaret, 
the " mother of crime," — truly a tree of the knowledge 
of good and evil, whose fruits have been disease and 
death, — and yet upon that sin-blasted and withered 

8 Pike, op. cit. 

i See The Jukes, by R. L. Dugdale. 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 221 

tree there are branches of " honesty," " industry," and 
"temperance " that are even more startling, when we 
consider their origin, than those scions of shame with 
which they are intertwined in the close embrace of 
brotherhood. The percentage of criminals in that 
fated family is appalling, but here and there a respect- 
able man rises as a protest against that fanaticism of 
fatality that would always look behind the sinner for 
his sin. When a "Juke " can become respectable it 
seems insolent in us to speak reproachfully of that 
unfortunate Adam, or these ancestral savages, whose 
posterity have too often striven to conceal their guilt 
under the credentials of their lineage. A note of 
necessity seems, however, to lie in this, that nearly all 
the crime that is committed is done by persons from 
twenty-five to forty-five years old, marking this period 
of twenty years, as what jurists call "the criminal 
age." But the volitional element in crime becomes 
evident the moment we consider that this maturity 
marks a voluntary progress requiring years to develop 
into a life of crime, and that between the cradle and 
adolescence lies that golden age of innocence, when 
children, though born of criminal parents and with 
all their hereditary savagery strong within them, have 
not yet become the devotees of crime. From thirty- 
five on to the end of life the proportion of crime grad- 
ually diminishes, and but seven per cent, is committed 
by persons over sixty-five years of age. Is it because 
it is found that "the way of the transgressor is hard," 
or is it that " the wages of sin is death " ? 

3. "The tendency to commit the great majority 



222 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of the acts which are now commonly described as 
crimes, and especially crimes of violence, is at its 
greatest strength just before, and at the time when, 
the human being attains the full development of his 
physical powers." 8 What is it that transforms the 
golden age of innocence, the period in which the 
child is incapable of crime, into that career of crim- 
inality that reaches its climax just when volition 
and intelligence are the best developed ? I know 
of no deeper psychological truth than that expressed 
in the old proverb : " An idle brain is the devil's 
workshop." Statistics show that eighty per cent, 
of the convicted criminals never learned a trade. 
It is estimated that ninety-five per cent, of the 
street-begging is done by and for those who could 
earn their living if they were industrious. The first 
school of crime is mendicancy. Little children are 
pressed into it, and from beggars lapse into thieves. 
The crimes against property are nearly ninety per 
cent, of the whole number, which reveals the rela- 
tion between crime and pauperism. The spontane- 
ous activity of a child is capable of direction, but 
will find its field in crime if not addressed to indus- 
try. The occupied have little time to plan and 
execute wrong, and the fruits of honest labor re- 
move the temptation to commit it. Idleness and 
poverty are inseparably connected, and the criminal 
class is constantly recruited from the pauper class 
at every stage of its development. The possession 
of property transforms the owner, develops his 

» Pike, op. cit. 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 



223 



sense of justice, creates in him respect for rights 
by reminding him that he himself has them, and 
renders him responsible for his conduct. I heard 
Fred Douglass say that, in his opinion, the only hope 
of the enfranchised American negroes lies in their 
becoming property owners. A careful inspection 
of prisons shows that the most of their inmates 
have never owned property. It was a Jewish prov- 
erb that " Whosoever does not teach his son a trade 
is as if he brought him up to be a robber." With 
all their defections, the sons of Israel have seldom 
been criminals. The mere tradition of industry has 
barred the path to the prison. 

4. I am doubtful whether poverty is the greater 
cause of ignorance or ignorance the greater cause 
of poverty. Like disease and death, they seem to 
produce each other by a reciprocal infection. Of 
the ten thousand inmates of the almshouses in New 
York, thirty-two per cent, could neither read nor 
write ; only twenty-four per cent, could both read and 
write. But the connection of ignorance and crime 
is not so close as that of ignorance and poverty. 
It is mainly through poverty that ignorance affects 
the increase of criminals. Only about twenty per 
cent, of the prisoners in the Eastern Penitentiary 
in Pennsylvania had never attended school. The 
worst grades of criminals show about this average. 
But the percentage of criminals who have never 
learned a trade is four times as high as the percent- 
age of those who have never been to school. 
Nearly one half of the prisoners just referred to 



2 24 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

were children of mechanics, honest men, who had 
failed to give their offspring a means of earning a 
livelihood. It is not literary ignorance that makes 
criminals. The education of the schools, if it does 
not shape those who receive it in right ways, renders 
them more efficient and skilful in crime, more able 
to avoid detection or to effect escape from justice, 
but constitutes no preventive check on the augmen- 
tation of the criminal class. It is the moral and 
religious element in school-training that curbs the 
criminal tendencies and so prevents the birth of 
crime in the learner. It is this element that a large 
number of our modern theorists are striving vigor- 
ously to drive from our public schools. 

5. The darkest lines in this sombre picture of the 
natural history of crime are those in which we trace 
the effects of intemperance. No one can touch this 
topic without being exposed to one of two dangers : 
one of shrinking from a theme so travestied because 
it is so hackneyed ; the other of joining in the 
intemperate zeal which would banish even from 
the holy communion the wine that symbolizes the 
warming life of atoning blood, which refers all sin 
to intoxicants, and makes their use the one scape- 
goat vice whose banishment is to bear all human 
guilt into the wilderness of oblivion. I do not 
understand how a distinguished English baronet 
could write a learned book on the " The Punishment 
and Prevention of Crime " 9 and never once refer to 
intemperance as a cause, or temperance reform as 

8 The Punishment and Prevention of Crime, by Sir Edmund F. Du Cane. 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 225 

a cure, of the disease whose pathology he describes. 
Nor do I see how a sane man can imagine that, if 
all intoxicants were swept from the earth to-day, 
there would be no crime in the world to-morrow. 
More than two centuries ago, a calm jurist of vast 
experience, Sir Matthew Hale, said : " If the mur- 
ders and manslaughters, the burglaries and robberies, 
the riots and tumults . . . and other enormities that 
have happened in my time were divided into five 
classes, four of them would be seen to have been 
the issue and product of excessive drinking, of 
tavern and alehouse drinking." 10 Carefully collated 
statistics show that from eighty to ninety per cent, 
of the crimes committed still have some connection 
with intemperate drinking. The indictment against 
intoxicants is strong enough, without incurring the 
charge of fanaticism and the humiliation of refuta- 
tion, to justify the sober assertion that the traffic 
that makes drunkards is responsible for four fifths 
of the crime committed in civilized lands, and should 
be made to bear its burdens. Should be made to 
bear its burdens, did I say? Nay, should be pro- 
hibited from its work of wreck and ruin. That the 
right of society to repress crime justifies the re- 
pression of crime's most prolific cause is too axio- 
matic to require discussion. 

6. But there is working in the nature of man a 
deeper and more subtle power of destruction than 
lies concealed in the drunkard's cup. It is the cause 
of which recourse to inebriation is but one of the 

10 Quoted by A. J. F. Behrends, Socialism and Christianity, chap. ix. 



2 26 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

effects. Why does a man seek the stupor or the 
exhilaration of intoxication ? Is it not usually a 
desolation of spirit, a hopelessness of heart, that 
finds the customary level of life dreary, and the 
future as empty as the present ? Some study of the 
psychology of inebriety has convinced me that, 
apart from physical disease, despair of life, tem- 
porary or permanent, is the secret cause of drunken- 
ness. It is the condition of those "who are strangers 
from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and 
without God in the world." If pessimism is possible 
as a philosophy, how common and how potent it 
must be as an impulse ! It is a perilous state when 
one considers life as chaff and emptiness. Disap- 
pointment, bereavement, and loss often induce this 
feeling. He who acts in such a mood, unrestrained 
by the bonds of a holy faith, or a fixed habit of 
caution, or a governing principle of rectitude, is in 
danger of falling into crime. Its deepest cause is 
moral recklessness, resulting from an unsatisfied 
spirit. 

7. If we seek the means of preventing and curing 
crime, we think at once of industrial occupation, 
education, and temperance — the world's remedies. 
They are only antidotes for symptoms, not cures of 
the disease, or even sure preventives of it. What is 
to make men industrious, intelligent, and temperate ? 
To what end is industry, if all terminates in dust and 
ashes ? To what purpose is intelligence, if it simply 
increases our knowledge of the evil in the world ? 
Why should a man be sober, if his powers are all to 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 



227 



crumble to decay to-morrow ? A flippant optimism 
may laugh at these questions and ridicule them as 
foolish, but a flippant optimist is likely to be too 
superficial to assume the role of ridicule with impun- 
ity. If certain current ideas, philosophic and popu- 
lar, of the nature and destiny of man are true, these 
are not only serious but forcible questions. On that 
supposition, I doubt if they can be answered with 
any stronger argument than ridicule. Whence comes 
the motive to be industrious, intelligent, and temper- 
ate ? There is a philosophy of life that would make 
all men criminals at heart, only waiting for the 
opportunity of action, if it were universally accepted. 
The true source of the motives that make men indus- 
trious, intelligent in any desirable sense, and temperate 
in their habits, is the conception and estimate of man 
presented by Christianity. I do not say that there 
are no men who possess virtues, who have not built 
them on this conception, because I recognize the fact 
that much of what passes for human virtue is compli- 
ance with social custom, the fruit of long-continued 
habit and of imitation. Much of our life is instinc- 
tive and automatic. There is a heredity of good, as 
well as a heredity of evil. What I mean to assert is 
that when the impulse to crime arises, its restraint, 
apart from mere fear, is found in some motive that 
springs out of the conception of man which is most 
distinctly taught by Jesus Christ. Others have, in 
part, held that conception, even before his day, and 
many since, without connecting it with a thought of 
him ; but it is, nevertheless, his idea of man. The 



2 28 SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

natural history of crime is simply this : " Every man 
is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust 
and enticed. Then, when lust hath conceived, it 
bringeth forth sin ; and sin, when it is finished, bring- 
eth forth death." The only power that can arrest 
that process, when it is begun, is the picture, in the 
soul, of man as Christ has portrayed him. Sometimes 
that sense of what we are, and what Christ's ideal is, 
flashes upon the mind as the blinding light that smote 
Saul to the earth when he rode to Damascus, sometimes 
it dawns as gently as the breaking of morning light 
upon the hilltops. Until it comes, the possibility of 
crime is an open pathway that needs only the suffi- 
cient enticement at its end to lure the footsteps into 
it. This is no mysticism that I am uttering. It is 
the plain truth that, without a right conception 
of man and his relations to God, it is merely an acci- 
dent if one is not a criminal. But many men have 
this and yet some of them are led to crime. There 
is needed one other security, the disposition to realize 
this high conception. The diathesis of moral disease 
must be superseded by the thrill of spiritual life. 
This is God's gift. " Ye will not come unto me, that 
ye might have life," said Christ. Christianity teaches 
that the final preventive and cure of human sin is in 
the regeneration of men through Christ as a Saviour. 
The world is striving to solve the problem of human 
sinfulness, which is the fountain of human crime, by 
work and knowledge and temperance. It will fail. 
Its psychology is superficial. Like a physician who 
represses symptoms and allows the disease to result 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 



229 



in death, it works upon the surface and leaves 
untouched the secret cause of crime. The mission of 
the Church is to apply the method of the world's 
Saviour and to cleanse the stream by the purification 
of the fountain. Evangelical work goes deeper than 
all humanitarian reforms and looks for the reformation 
of the outward life through the renovation of the 
heart. 

III. 

1. We have now examined the relation of Christi- 
anity to the leading problems of society. We have 
found everywhere Christ's conception of man throwing 
light upon these problems. If the laborer has rights, 
it is because he is endowed with personality. If the 
distribution of wealth is possible upon other grounds 
than the rule of the strongest, it is because these 
personal rights radiate outward from the man and 
project themselves in the sphere of property. If 
marriage and the family are to be preserved to soci- 
ety, it is through the recognition of personal rights in 
the domestic circle. If education is to receive its 
perfection in the complete unfolding of human 
powers, the spiritual and moral nature of man must 
be regarded. If legislation is to embody justice and 
realize liberty, it must postulate the doctrine of per- 
sonal freedom and of rights and duties as the ground 
of freedom. Finally, if crime is to be repressed and 
extirpated, the moral regeneration of men must be 
accepted as possible and the universal reign of 
mechanical necessity must be denied. 

2. The relation of Christianity to these problems is 



23O SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

briefly this : it carries the master-key that unlocks 
every one of them ; that master-key is Christ's con- 
ception of man. I bring the question to this issue : 
let what Christ has taught of man's nature and des- 
tiny be denied ; let the mind picture society as an 
organism whose constituents are impersonal automata, 
mechanical products of matter and its forces, infinitely 
complex, but still governed by the law of physical 
fatality ; let the fact of personality be rejected and 
the reality of inherent rights be contradicted ; and I 
affirm that, when men universally believe this, social 
order will have no existence, the physically weaker 
will go down in the struggle for life under the remorse- 
less competition of the stronger, and the human race 
will be plunged into a general pandemonium. Every 
disruption of social order that has lately startled the 
fears of men has originated from some phase of this 
chain of assumptions. On the other hand, let all that 
Christ has taught be admitted ; let it be assumed that 
each personal being is endowed with inherent rights 
and immortal life ; let it be conceded that the 
human brotherhood is linked together under the laws 
of a moral order and the providence of a beneficent 
Father ; — and an ideal state will be realized among 
men. In the light of that contrast, I venture the 
assertion that, if ever an ideal order is realized by 
humanity, it will be under the leadership of the 
Christian conception of man and will require that for 
its basis. The current agitation of mind over social 
questions is the best token that the hearts and con- 
sciences of men are stirred as they never have been 



CHRISTIANITY AND REPRESSION. 23 I 

stirred before ; and it requires little insight to discover 
that the postulates underlying the discussion of social 
problems and the hopes of social amelioration are 
derived from the teachings of Christ, however illogi- 
cal and grotesque some of their applications may seem 
to be. Christus Redemptor has, with atoning sacri- 
fice, brought forgiveness of sin to the great company 
of the redeemed. Christus Consolator has stanched 
the tears of the world's sorrow and filled the hearts of 
the afflicted and the wronged with immortal hope. 
Christus Consummator will establish the kingdom of 
God in the hearts of men and transform human soci- 
ety at last into an order of final perfection. And you 
of this noble School of the Prophets, soon to go forth 
as heralds of that coming kingdom, have a work more 
vital to the progress of social regeneration than that 
of any economist or jurist or social reformer of your 
time. Your part may seem humble and your reward 
not very great, but it will not be so in the final esti- 
mate of eternal values, " for all things are yours, . . . 
whether the world, or life, or death, or things present, 
or things to come ; all are yours ; and ye are Christ's \ 
and Christ is God's." 



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